I have well over 110 identical backlinks of widely varying quality - is it worth taking the page they're linking to down?

[travis-taylor]

The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.'

We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links.

Has anyone dealt with this before?

[JaneCopland]

Hi John,

This is not an uncommon problem - have you tried contacting any of the spammy sites and requesting the links be taken down? Link take-downs are also very common nowadays and are a good way of both culling undesirable links and gathering "evidence" that you have tried to clean things up if you need to send a reconsideration request to Google.

If the request to take down the link comes from an official company email address, and you follow up within ~10 days to sites you get no response from, link removal requests can be quite successful. Granted, there will be some sites you cannot contact or who don't get back to you (and some will ask for money to take the link down - it's up to you if the price they ask for is worth it). If you are truly dealing with penalties, removing links is a lot more effective than other options.

One other option is to "disavow" the bad links through Webmaster Tools - more information on link disavowal is available here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

We have always found, however, that actually removing the links is most effective, and that disavowal is a good tool for when you can't remove some of the links.

Cheers,

Jane

[travis-taylor]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for the response.

I'm familiar with the process of asking for link takedowns and for going through the disavowal process - the main thing I'm asking is whether or not having **identical **links is harmful - the pagerank for several of the linking sites is quite high, the backlink itself is an endnote to what looks to be a repeating set of glossaries about a medical procedure... many other backlinks are completely unambiguous about whether or not they should be removed altogether, but I'm looking for a bit of clarification as to whether or not it's ok to have that many identical links in terms of google's hamfisted approach to penalizing.

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi again,

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

The links being from identical content should not be harmful to you - this sort of citation is fairly common, e.g. when a site has shared a piece of viral content like a video, infographic, tool (calculator etc.) or cited case study that others reproduce and link back to. I'd be far more concerned about the quality of the linking sites.

I think the duplication question will also be even less of an issue if you remove the poor-quality links: identical citations from high-quality sources will pass as normal and not malicious liking activity.