How to remove non-requested, non-desired backlinks

[MarieHaynes]

Have you tried the whois info?  A site's contact info is USUALLY in there.  However, I have found that only a small percentage of website owners actually respond to the emails I have sent via whois info.

Just a question, and not meant to be condemning at all, but how do you think you got hundreds of links like this?  It sounds to me like something that would happen after using a backlink service.  (You know, the kind that promises hundreds of links for one low price.)  I've got a few such spammy links to my site, but not hundreds.

[SharewarePros]

No one from here works with backlinks services, I think it can be performed by one competitor, from years til now.

our site is freesharewaredepot.com please take a look and give us your ideas or something that Im mis.

Thank you

Claudio

[MarieHaynes]

This doesn't look like any kind of negative SEO campaign to me.  The majority of your backlinks (including the ones that you are asking about) use your url as an anchor.  If someone was attempting to try to get you a penguin hit or an unnatural links warning they'd be spamming you with a keyword anchor.  (And it's debatable whether that would even work.)

It looks to me like you are still in the index and you are ranking #1 for the term that you are targeting in your home page title.

How do you feel these links are affecting your traffic?  If you had an unnatural links penalty then you wouldn't be ranking.  If you had a penguin hit then there would be a dramatic traffic drop on April 24 or May 25.

Otherwise I'm guessing there's something else going on.  How dramatic is your traffic drop?  Is it for all keywords or just specific ones?

It's possible that you lost some link equity because sites that link to you got hit with a penalty.  And there are many other possible reasons.

[EGOL]

Some of my sites have lots of backlinks from trashy directories and mash-up sites.  I had nothing to do with getting these links.  They are gifts from people who are making spammy websites.

I think that most websites acquire lots of these links over time - especially if you have a website that ranks well in popular SERPs.  If you had nothing to do with placing them then I would not worry about them unless google sends you a  warning.

[SharewarePros]

Dear Marie,

Our traffic drops on Apr and May at 50%, and some pages (not home) was performing well (google 3 first positions) and now they are on the 2 or 3rd page.

Honestly Im very worried about that.

I appreciate all your help

Claudio

[SharewarePros]

Dear EGOL,

No warnings from google, only traffic drops -50% (actually our Home page ranks well) but the internal pages not.

I extract from SEOMoz the links and I start sending them emails asking for link removal and no one has responded, and some of them don't have contact form or email details, I'll try contact them via Whois records.

Do you recommends perform this HUGE and slave task with minimal results or only forget and go ahead.

I appreciate your opinions and help

Thank you

Claudio

[MarieHaynes]

I wouldn't go removing links until you know that the links are actually what are causing your drop.  The majority of these links are pointing at your home page so it would be weird for your inner pages to drop if they were causing you a problem.  If you remove a bunch of links you could possibly do more harm than good!

Can you pinpoint your traffic drop to a particular day?  Try looking at your analytics and selecting organic search traffic.  If you can pinpoint a particular day then you may be able to determine if this is Penguin related or not.  It could be a Panda issue and if that's the case then it's really nothing to do with your backlinks, but rather an onsite issue.

And there are other possible reasons as well!  So again, don't go on a massive link removal campaign until you are sure that that's what needs to be done!

[MarieHaynes]

Have a close look to see if your traffic drop coincides with either April 19th or April 27th which are days of Panda refreshes.  In looking at your inner pages I'm starting to wonder if this is a Panda issue....

[EGOL]

I would not work to remove them, yet.

I think that you are getting great advice from Marie.  I would listen to her opinions.

[SharewarePros]

Dear Marie,

Our Drops starts on April 23 to April 30 (500 visitors to 280) you're correct, so it was a Panda hit?

Thank you for all your help

Claudio

[SharewarePros]

Dear all,

I found this history google update doc http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

and Penguin starts on Apr 24 and Apr 27 another Panda.

In conclusion (I want to share my point of view coming from your knowledge):

1. Penguin hits our site because, we has a few high quality links and some of them was hitted by Penguin. Possible solution get more links (natural etc).

2. Panda, some of our pages specially categories and sub categories were including repetitive content and canonical problems between them (this issue was partially resolved). I'll continue resolving this.

Finally please give me your opinions about this.

Thank you again for all your help, Im very happy to participate with you in SEOMOz and I think this is a great community!

[MarieHaynes]

If the drop started April 23 then it's not likely to be Penguin.  However, it's a tough call because you could have had a natural drop that started on April 23 and then got augmented on the 24th.  But, there were Panda refreshes on April 19 and 27th.  I'm pretty reluctant to call it either without a real in depth look at your analytics.

Penguin is generally a keyword specific drop, so if you can pinpoint that you have dropped for particular keywords that have been overoptimized in your backlink profile then you could go in this direction.  However, the backlinks that you pointed out originally all seem to have your url as anchor text so I have a hard time believing that this is Penguin.  (With that being said, I haven't done a full analysis of your site and backlink profile.)

What made me wonder if this was Panda was that your inner pages have very little content above the fold.  All of the content above the fold seems to be the same for each page.  And then, the content that is below the fold is mostly brief product descriptions - not a lot that Google can recognize as substantial content.

Again, I'd be really hesitant to go removing links in this case.  If this were my site I'd do the following:

-have a really thorough look at my analytics to see if the traffic drop can be attributed to one or more particular keywords

-if yes, then I'd start cleaning up links that contained those keywords as anchors.

-if no, then I'd start changing my pages so that there is more substantial content, especially above the fold, for each of these pages.  I'd also go looking for other places where I could be violating the quality guidelines on page such as hidden text, etc.  Then, once this was cleared up I'd wait for the next Panda refresh to see if I had recovered.