Link Building & Moz metrices

[hardik_hrc]

I am just starting up so no flaming please.

Okay so i was given a project and i was amused to see a lot of backlinks to the website with viagra pills title.

This is why i assume the domain authority is very low.

I tried asking a few website owners to drop the links but they said its a lot of manual work they wont do it(that was shocking)

So what next?

Would building authority links in any domains help me in this case?

[duoweb]

Already have many good links pointing to your website? You might consider to start out fresh on a new domain and contact the webmasters of the good links to change them to the new domain...

[DougRoberts]

First thing to do is not to panic.

Do you know if these links are actually causing a problem? You say there are a lot, but what's the ratio of good links to bad links? Are you getting any warnings in Google webmaster tools?

Why do these links exist in the first place? Did the site get hacked? Was the site trying to rank for dubious keywords? Take a look at the wayback machine to see what the site history looked like?

How many sites are linking to you with bad anchor text?

Is the content from the site still included in google's index? Is it ranking where you'd expect it to rank (taking an honest, objective view)

Where are these links pointing to? Are the linking to your root domain or to a particular page(s)? You might be able to remove the page they're linking to (leaving a 404 error) in order to distance yourself from the bad links.

Before you go forward and start building "good links" you need to know just how big a hole you're in to start with. As duowab says, it might be worth setting up a new domain, but you need to think about the cost/ROI. How much is the current domain worth, how much direct traffic is there? Are pages ranking already and getting traffic?

So, don't panic, take time to get a grip on the stoke of the situation and don't take any quick decisions that are going to cost the site traffic/income.

It's hard to be specific without knowing more details, but hope this helps.

[hardik_hrc]

Thanks Doug Insightful.

Now.

The site is ranking on the page it should but even after having very good google places and the only site in search result with address markup its not ranking at first.

Google webmaster doesnt show any link related problems.

Wayback Machine didnt help me with determining past links but looking at current links i assume at least 40% links are unworthy and spam.

This is the case with both the sites i am working.

1. www.421taxi.com

2. www.landregistry-e-services.co.uk

With both the sites starting a new domain isnt a good idea the domains have been there for a long time and the business is run by both clients based on the URL.

So costing gets too high to revert to a new domain.

Currently Site has 1500 around links.

And 40% spam still leaves 60% with good anchor text but yet those come from low quality websites so wont make much impact in performance.

So now what would you say good authority backlinks still good for this?

[DougRoberts]

Looking at the www.421taxi.com site, I downloaded all inbound links from open site explorer. I could see a whole bunch of spammy links which to me look as if the site was compromised in the past.

To be honest, from what you'd been saying I expected worse!

The good news is that almost all of these links go pages in /archives and /reviews which no longer exist and return a 404 error. So you won't be getting any value from these links so I don't believe you'd be penalised for them.

There are a couple pointing at the homepage(with a ?p=xx parameter), but I wouldn't worry too much about these.

(Look at the Top Pages report in Open Site Explorer and you'll see the pages most linked to... lots of dead pages with No Data...)

Keep an eye on your anchor text as you build links. You don't want to trigger an over optimisation penalty!)

www.landregistry-e-services.co.uk doesn't look as if it has the same problem.

[hardik_hrc]

Yeah i had seen a lot of spam links so i started new content and removed all those pages leaving 404.

Thanks a lot buddy this really helped.