Can 302's Negate Spam Link Profile?

[kirmeliux]

To make a long story short, the previous SEO company we hired spammed us on LOTS of crappy links, many of which are still indexed. We're currently in the act of removing these links before we receive a manual spam penalty/notification + building new, stronger links to balance out our profile.

While most of these garbage links were sent to our homepage, many are linking our Services page (and a bunch to our .com/sitemap.html for some reason, lol).

Now we're in the midst of updating our entire website and the permalinks are going to change. While I'd normally 301 our old links to the new ones, Id  rather not bring the horrible link profile with it if at all possible.

Would a simple 302 redirect effectively dodge the bad juju from these spam links to our Services page since they pass 0 juice? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[webmethod]

Hi,

You're far from being alone with the issues you described, but personally I wouldn't recommend what you're suggesting:

1. Using a 302 from the old to new URL structure will impact every link pointing at the old URLs be they a quality or spam backlink.
2. Using a 302 rather than a 301 means there's a good chance that Google will index both the old and new URLs and cause duplicate content and PageRank splitting issues. This is likely to make things worse for you.

If I was you I'd disavow the spam links per Google's policy (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en), set up 301s to your new URLs and following a bit of patience, start your SEO afresh with a clean slate.

George

@methodicalweb

[kirmeliux]

Hey George,

Thanks for the response.

1. I am not concerned with the old link structure losing juice from quality links as their simply are none. The only links built to our non-root URL are spam from the SEO package that was purchased in the past. And even if there were a few decent links, the ratio between quality and spam is so out of whack that it'd be a worthy venture if we could ditch the spam links IMO.

Also, the non-root URL pages these links have targeted that I want to 302 aren't anything I'm interested in ranking for down the line. They were our About Us pages and our Sitemap. I'd just like to distance our domain from these spam links at any cost and start "fresh."

2. The upgraded page has been completely rewritten, so there's no risk of duplicate content issues when the new site goes live. It's entirely different from the current version. The old URL is also going to be removed from the domain entirely, so I'd imagine Google would eventually remove it from the index.

I'm planning on submitting a disavow sheet down the line, but that's a last resort if link removal and tactics like these can't help clean up my profile.

Thanks for the help.

[kirmeliux]

Does anyone have any insight into this issue?

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Sorry, I thought I answered this! I think I lost my internet connection for a bit.

On pages where you have no good links you want to salvage AND no significant incoming (organic/referred) traffic, I would just return a 410 response code and kill them off entirely.

On pages where you have no good links but you do receive traffic, I would 302 redirect them.

On pages with good and bad links, I would either leave them (200) or 301 redirect them, clean up the links as best you can, and disavow those spammy domains (or pages, in fewer cases) that are spammy if they fail to take their links down.

Hope that helps!

[kirmeliux]

Hey Carson,

Thanks for the response. 404/410ing was going to be my game plan initially, but I was curious if a 302 was "better" than returning dead pages. In either case, it's only a few pages so I don't think it matters much. Our traffic was from this page being used across our local citations which did receive referral traffic. They've since been changed to our root URL, so no worries on not 301'ing or 302'ing that link. 404 it is.

The majority of the bad links are to our root domain, so I've been busy lately sending removal requests and such and preparing out disavow sheets. I was hoping for an "easier" fix to simply get rid of the dead pages, but killing them does indeed seem best.

I guess I'll go with the original plan to kill the pages which have the bulk of the spammy links, 301 the "cleaner" old structures without links aimed at them, and continue trying to remove the spammy links to the root URL.

Thanks for the input!