Best Course of Action For Over Optimized Link Profile

[kirmeliux]

I'm working on a few sites right now and before I came on board, they purchased spammy link building packages. For instance, one site shows 3.8k links from 600 root domains. As you can guess, these are ALL spammy pages with dozens to hundreds of links on each. They're all targeted keywords to the homepage. Our other site shows 600+, and again, all spammy links from unrelated spam sites and free link directory packages.

The site in question had duplicate content taken from other sites and about 7 pages total indexed. It has since been updated to a WordPress theme with original content and many additional pages. It also has proper SCHEMA locations as it is a legitimate, local business.

We receive next to no organic traffic, the pages don't rank for the terms (duh), and basically I'm concerned with moving forward. I don't want to spend time building legitimate links to our sites if we're already nuked by Google.

What I'm asking is, do any of you have experience _successfully _using the disavow tool to remove past links? I really don't think a solid link building campaign to our newly updated site is going to undo the thousands of spammy and over-optimized links we have in place already.

How likely is it that Google gets the point that we are a legitimate site with new, fresh content when the site receives legitimate links from related sites and such?

[customerparadigm.com]

Unless it's a particularly amazing domain name, this is an issue that's going to follow you for quite some time.  The disavow link system can be helpful in circumstances like this, but it's always been promoted by Google as a tool of last resort.

Not knowing much about the site, my $0.02 would probably vote for a clean slate with a new domain name, and shut down the older site.

[kirmeliux]

Thanks for the response, Jeff.

I actually meant to include a bit about starting over in the original post as I'd considered that. These sites are for local businesses which have LOTS of local business situations throughout the web. They're legitimate businesses with Yelp reviews and Google+ pages and such and the search engines have absolutely linked the sites with the businesses. I feel like this is the only reason why they're not completely sandboxed and crushed in Google's eyes because they're legit, solid businesses.

So the domain name isn't AMAZING, but it's the company name and lots of legit, local "building" has been done in the previous years just by it functioning as a legitimate business. We have many citations throughout the web that link this business NAP to the site and correcting all of these would be kind of a hassle (even with a service like Yext).

Another site has 375 links, nearly all from directories. I know these links suck, but a small site shouldn't be completely crushed by a directory link package, should it?

[Ron_McCabe]

This is really a question of labor versus value.  You can use tools as well as contact other sites that have bad links and disconnect that way.  It can be done but it takes a lot of time.  If it is worth the labor cost do it.  If it is not, don't

[kirmeliux]

Thanks for the response. I agree. One thing I want to mention is that each of these sites are connected to Webmaster Tools and none of them have alerts for unnatural or spammy link building.

Also, one of the sites in question ranks for a bunch of keywords in spots 40-80, so Google hasn't totally devalued the domain.

To answer your question, yes, it would be worth it if it would have an impact on the rankings. What I'm curious about is how damaging these links can be. I mean, obviously they're bad, no questions about that. But if Webmaster Tools hasn't sent a message and we currently have some rankings, we can't be totally screwed, can we?

Thanks again for the response. Bah, such a difficult situation.

[gazzerman1]

You could be just one more Penguin revision away from a penalty.

I would get most of those bad links in a disavow file right away. The start to contact as many as you can and get the worst ones removed. this will safeguard you from a future penalty.

Once this is done you will have to wait for Google to re-crawl all those links to apply the nofollow attribute via the disavow.

While you wait for that to happen you can start by getting some traction on white hat link building / outreach.

This whole process can be done very very quickly. You must also confirm that the issue of rank drop is related to Penguin or you may see very little changes.

I have a site that was hit so hard by panda and Penguin that its been very difficult to recover and a new domain could be on the cards. Its a large site with a big brand that has been around for 10 years but almost 3 years of bad rankings has been a nightmare and very expensive path for the company to have taken up to this point. Who knows where the company would have been if it was moved to a new domain with 3 years of work applied to it.

[kirmeliux]

Hey Gary,

Thanks for the helpful response and I'm sorry to hear about your site being hit. I don't think our site was ever "hit" by anything. The only link building that has been done were the spam packages that were purchased before I came on board.

But even if we haven't been hit yet, I really doubt we'll be able to climb too high with these links in place. I guess I have no chance but to start requesting that these links be removed.

Do you have any helpful hints on how I can go about this quicker? Is the Link Assistant tool any good? I see that it has options for importing links and searching their page for contact information w/ a built-in email client. Any ideas?

Thanks all.

Edit: Just to clarify, I know there are services for this like RemoveEm and RMOOV. I'm curious about software being available to do this ourselves. Thanks.

[KristinaKledzik]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure of a way you can go about this quickly without a service like Link Detox and RMOOV. But, if I were in your shoes, I would:

1. Get a list of all URLs pointing to your site. Sounds like you already have one, based on the question.
2. If you're willing to use a service, use Link Detox to identify spammy links. If you'd like to do this on your own, get the PageRank for each link (it'll be quicker with an API, but you can always use Google's toolbar). If it's a PageRank 0, it's probably bad.
3. Manually review PageRank 1 and 2 sites. Sorry, no way to skip that without using a tool.
4. Get a list of spammy sites that you'd like to remove links from. Use Whois to find the contact information. They have an API as well.
5. Email all of them. This needs to be done by you regardless of whether or not there's a tool out there for it, because you're going to need to have those emails as evidence that you're taking steps to clean this up in case you ever get hit by Penguin.
6. After giving them enough time to respond, and a few follow up emails, disavow any links that webmasters weren't willing to take links down for.

You didn't make it sound like it's an option, but it's worth mentioning that many of these sites may still be owned by the person who was originally paid to put those links up. Any chance you could dig through finances to get contact information for all paid links and remove them that way?

Good luck!

[kirmeliux]

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for the response. Your outline is honestly the exact steps I've taken, only I didn't use RMOOV or any other service to identify the bad links because virtually ALL of our links were bad.

Here's what I did:

I downloaded all of our links from both OSE and WMT and stripped duplicates. I then used an Excel add-in that stripped ROOT domains into the B column. I combined that with some Excel functions to compare a list of domains I'd created (good domains, such as our local citations) and return a result if they showed up. That way I could enter a list with Yelp, Angie's List, etc. and remove the "good" links. So I stripped out duplicates, good domains, and had the rest.

I got all the WHOIS information I could by using this Bulk WHOIS checker and grouped domains together with the same WHOIS information (as well as sites which were clearly part of the same network). I've sent out hundreds of requests and screen shotted all of them for when the time comes to prove our case to Google.

And I've been keeping the disavow sheet current as I go along, noting sites which have no contact information, appear to be down for now (still disavowing in case they return), and sites which demand payment to remove links.

And as you asked about in the end, I contacted the company which purchased/built these links in the first place. They claimed they still had control over them. When I asked them about removing them, they stopped responding. They're shady, and honestly I wouldn't feel comfortable paying them to remove links, because they could just generate more in the future and offer their "link removal services" to us down the line.

Thanks again for the response! I'm still plugging away at removing these crappy links. One day the profiles will be balanced enough to sustain Google's algorithm changes!

[KristinaKledzik]

Sounds like you're on the right track, nice job! And, I agree with you, I wouldn't pay a company to remove links, even if I paid them to put them up in the first place. Especially since you have the power of the disavow tool.

Good luck!