Removed Site-wide links

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords?

Thanks

[zigojacko]

Are you removing sitewide links on other domains pointing to your website or are you referring to sitewide internal linkage within your own site?

[Paul78]

Hi Geoff,

I am removing site-wide links externally.

[anthonydnelson]

Are you doing this as a preventative measure or had you already seen a significant drop in rankings before making this decision?

I would only remove them if they are on spammy sites. Then, focus on getting some more good, branded links to even out your backlink profile.

[zigojacko]

There are so many questions here really before it's clear what the cause could be, some of these include:-

1. Are these from other sites you own? One would presume so if you access to remove the links?
2. If so, are these sites hosted on the same server as the domain they were pointing to?
3. Did the sitewide links contain keywords as the anchor text or were they branded?
4. Why did you choose to remove the sitewide links in the first place?
5. Did any of the other websites containing these sitewide links suffer recently as a result of algorithm updates or decline in rankings.
6. The page(s) that the sitewide links were pointing to, does this have other existing links still pointing to it? What % were they were reduced by after the removal of the sitewide links? And of those existing, are they a mix of nofollow/dofollow?

Often, the removal of mass of backlinks will cause a drop as you've experienced. Normally because it's a major shift in the link profile and doesn't look 'natural', providing there was legitimate reasons and there are no other issues that can be raised against the domain in question, often, ranking positions are pretty much reinstated again.

Incidentally, how we often get round this scenario is to keep the sitewide link in place but write a script to only make the link on the homepage followed - and all the others add the nofollow link relationship.

[Paul78]

Hi Anthony,

As a preventative measure, however it looks like it's backfired. The site-wide links were not on spammy websites, there were high PR, lots of social interaction etc.

Would you ask to get these back on site-wide?

[Paul78]

Hi Geoff.

1. These are not websites I own, I had asked the webmaster to remove these site-wide links which they did.

2. They are not hosted on the same server.

3. The anchor text was keyword specific.

4. As a preventative measure, however it looks like this has back-fired.

5. Not to my knowledge, check PR and all is still the same.

6. Yes, they do have other links pointing to it, however in terms of percentage very little, as these were site-wide which was going into the thousands.

Some keywords have disappeared that were not in the site-wide links, which is a concern, maybe there is something else going on?

Shall I get the webmaster to re-instate these site-wide links?