Links are still showing in Opensite explorer?

[KristopherWho]

I did some link building for some friends last year, since then our relationship has changed & I removed the links I created. It's been 2 months & the links still show up in Open site explorer, & their website is still kicking butt. How long will it take for the links to be unassigned for their profile?

[IainReloadMedia]

Hi Kristopher,

Good question on link indexing.

For the sake of helping you out and the sanity of the SEOMOZ community, I'll pretend I didn't read you removed the links because of the change in relationship

Open Site Explorer updates about every month. However it's not a full update, as it can't recrawl every page on the Internet each time. So when these stop showing will depend on how important Open Site Explorer thinks to page is. If it was less important it won't get crawled for a while.

RE: The rankings. Google will most likely find the links have been removed first. The only way to confirm this is with having access to Google Webmasters for that domain. However I wouldn't sweat it, if no SEO work is being done it won't continue to rank for long.

Hope that helps you understand the link indexing process.

Thanks

Iain - Reload Media

[KristopherWho]

Thanks.

And just to clear things up, I'm not a SEO. I did some free work for some friends of mine, we are not friends anymore, & so I removed the links from my websites to theirs.