Removing Poison Links w/o Disavow

[jesse-landry]

Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today.

There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html"

This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself.

So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen.

How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least.

One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here?

Here we go!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jesse,

If you change the url even a bit and let the old one 404 then you will accomplish what you want in terms of cutting the bad incoming links, so if all of them are poison as you say, then this is probably a logical option. You could also consider a 410 response which might remove the page from the index faster and is considered more permanent (gone forever).

In terms of the incoming traffic I would keep two things in mind.

1. Firstly it would be nice to identify where that direct traffic is coming from as much as possible. Check out this article for a couple of ideas on what traffic might be hiding behind those numbers and apply to your situation as relevant. If you have a couple of days/weeks to be patient you can manually tag some of the likely sources to see what data that gives you.

2. If possible consider making a custom 404/410 page for this instance giving real users a link to the new page. Not 100% sure on the technicalities of how google will assess a link to the new page from the now old page which is returning a 4xx status. You could meta tag the 404 noindex, follow or even noindex, nofollow I suppose to further enforce the disconnect between the old and the new while still keeping the link available for human visitors.

Hope that helps.

[jesse-landry]

Those are great suggestions Lynn, thank you.

I read the article about direct traffic and it made me feel a little better... My theory at this point is even if there are people out there bookmarking this URL (still not sure why they would and the % of new visitors is quite high on the direct source) they will find their way to the new one.

I do have a custom 404 page that is super helpful and should easily get people to their destination should they happen upon our old URL. It is a broad, site-wide 404 of course and not a specialized one for this page.. I didn't realize this was an option and it's an interesting thought. I will consider it. It does make me nervous. I want to get rid of every trace of this page as quickly as possible.

We are supplementing with a slight bump in PPC in the meantime. Luckily I have it in my budget to do so. And the thing is.. we are currently outranked by all of our competitors so it can't get much worse.

The real kicker here is all of our competitors are using blackhat tactics. It's extremely frustrating. Their links are coming from Bangladesh Travel Forums talking about hair products and linking to completely irrelevant pages with exact-match anchor phrasing. And there are thousands of them... It's been this way for many months and I keep thinking they'll get penalized but so far it's us falling in the rankings. Hopefully this makes a difference. We'll see --

One thing I do notice about the other blackhat sites is that they don't have any links pointing at internal pages, only the subdomain. Our former blackhat pointed at the internal page in question (and the subdomain as well) and while I've removed as many as possible it's still affecting us. The thing is, the other keywords I target that are just as competitive I am kicking butt in. Top 3 spots for several of them and they don't have any links pointing to the specific page targeting said keyword. So I hope that theory carries over to this primary keyword as well.

I'm babbling now. That's what I get for thinking about work on the weekend!

Thanks again and I'll keep the moz-community posted.