How to take down a sub domain which is receiving many spammy back-links?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have a sub domain which has less engagement for last few years. Eventually many spammy back links pointed to this sub domain. There are relevant back links too. We have deleted most of the pages which are employing spammy content or which have spammy back links. Still I'm confused whether to take this sub domain down or keep it. The confusion between "relevant backlinks might be helping our website" and "spammy backlinks are affecting to drop in rankings"?

Thanks

[Cesare.Marchetti]

Hi vtmox,

Simply disavow the links that are spammy: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en. Thats it. Doing that you tell Google which ones not to take into account and the "good" ones will still going to benefit your subdomain. There is no need to take the subdomain down.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

[vtmoz]

Hi Cesare,

But there are too many backlinks from different sub domains and how we are going to check thousands of links to disavow them? I think its hard to go with.

[Cesare.Marchetti]

Hi vtmoz,

OK. You can upload a file containing all the domains you want to disavow you don't need to do that one by one. To check thousands of links is not something one wants to do for sure actually...

How you could do it: Disavow them all (from Webmaster Tools you export them all to a file) and then you delete a couple of dozens you know are strong and valuable domains.

Cheers,

Cesare