Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As Federico said they are already rather a few have already gone but remember they won't give any boost to SEO which I've spoken to some people who seem to think they do.

Good luck getting you're chosen .guru

did you check your robots.txt also did you try different user agents with screaming frog? also make sure your cms isnt blocking anyone.

1) What is the best way to regular check backlinks?

Depends on your "style" you can use the following tools -

• Majestic SEO
• Ahref
• Open site explorer
• Google Webmaster tools
• All of the above

2) what to do if a spammy link appears

Firstly ensure it is "spammy" sometimes links are seen to be spammy when they are not (it might just be a customer with a blog who really wants to say how great your brand it but they can't create a great looking website)

if you are sure they are spammy though you can either drop the webmaster an email and ask them to either remove the link or change it to a no-follow link or you can disavow the link, you can also do both (which i recommend). Remember No-follow link - no worries.

3) What to do about directories that link to us

Directories are not all bad, if they are in your niche and are helping really users find you then they are fine but if you are not sure try the above advice (point 2)

4) What to do with old links that are not good quality

Remember a website is diverse it is meant to have low and high quality links and everything in between. If a website only has high quality it can look suspicious so unless they are spam so long as they are in the right niche and on point with your site they are fine.

5) Now I have to check number of links and quality of links of website so which is the best method check?

See point 1. I would also recommend things like the Moz tool bar for a "at a glance" look of things. Look into Moz Page & domain authority or Majestic trust and citation flow etc. each brand has their own version which can help you judge a websites authority.

Hope that helps.

Bit of a short response, but have you considered automating this?

We've used link detox: http://www.linkdetox.com for a few of our clients in the same situation and the results have been good.

You can also specify all of your current disavowed links to avoid duplicating work.

Using that tool you could automate the scan and it would generate you a disavow list each time.

if a user wants green shoes and goes to

www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes

but in fact then gets a page about black shoes what do you think they will do ?

I would think they would bounce and then turn your high traffic page to a low traffic page.  It may make more sense to not try to trick users into going to pages, Google doesn't like tricks either.

If in doubt ignore SEO and look at it from a user point of view as that's what Google wants, it wants the best for a user. if you go to a site and you're redirected all over the place it doesn't make for a pleasant experience.

In Short, redirecting pages won't help in a longer term for SEO, making a good site for user experience with good content will help. Look at other ways to promote those pages, e.g make a review of a product on the page etc.

Hope that helps a bit.

Hi David,

There is no direct way to see what competitors keywords are but you can use Moz to help work out some sites etc. they may be using see below for some ideas.

1. Here are some good tools if you're a pro subscriber and if not you can still use OSE.

http://moz.com/labs/link-finder

http://moz.com/labs/link-acquisition

and not forgetting the "link opportunities" tab  of the open site explorer

It's one of the better one's but you can also research keywords in other ways e.g. seeing what "other users" have searched for at the bottom of the page etc. One great thing you can do in Adwords is (which links to point one)  put a competitor's landing page when looking for keyword opportunities There is also a whole blog category if you wanted a look in Moz - http://moz.com/blog/category/keyword-research

Hope that helps a bit, I'm sure some other Moz fans will give some excellent advice too.

Have you tried blocking it in robots ?

#Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

Hello,

Did you receive a penalty in your WMT ? There wasn't much a couple of days ago other than a large link network being removed I know a lot of people in the network have received a slap, might want to check your site has never been in the network and work on cleaning up after said network if it has.

You could look into a link audit see if you've got any links Google doesn't like though this depends if you had a message from Google. It sounds to me you got hit from the removal of the following network -

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-anglo-rank-links-17783.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/anglo-rank-google-penalty-17799.html

Good luck.

301 them to the nearest page not the homepage.

If you don't have a page that matches try to do the best you can - e.g if its a eCommerce you could 301 it to a similar product.

301 everything to a home page will not only loose a lot of link juice, it will annoy any users trying to find a product via old links and Google isn't keen on a 301 to a homepage if its not necessary.

Take the time to 301 all the links to the nearest page to what the old link used to point to and it will save you time in the long run.

They do the same thing so there is no difference in that sense, Fetch as Google is helpful that it will show you can errors or blocked resources. submitting for Google is not the sole way to rank a page and really its only the very start.  A third option is you can submit your site though social media and let it be found this way, it can be helpful because its a bit more organic.

?It should respect the robots so may be some one pretending to be Baidu I  would try HTACCESS if you're not looking to go near China etc.

As billy said Copyscape is a great option but you can also take sections of the text put it in Google see what comes up. If you can't trust your copy writer they may not be for you then. You can always ask to see previous work when getting some one new and look to see if its also duplicated etc.

Hi James,

A homepage redirection would best. If you don't have similar content you would loose a lot of the link juice though and users looking for older content may end up as a bounce on your site so it may be worth letting them 404 depending on what you want from the redirect.

You may find the following blog post helpful -

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

don't under estimate the power of social, local & video!

Agree with Federico,

Take a look in other areas (e.g WMT or majestic) to confirm  then look at what you've done recently to get the links. Have you run a viral campaign etc. if not are you suffering from some competitors spamming you to bring you down ? things to look at are anchor texts (are they spamming or from people shouting how great your site is?), domains (are a lot of them coming form one domain or more?) and authority (are they all really low domain authority etc.) That shout get you on the right road.

Good luck!

SEO there is no huge benefit but lets look at it a different way :

user experience - at the end of the day that what we are all aiming to make great, if you have a great website that's great to use people will want to use it and fingers crossed share it. Dynamic sites are great because they fit into the users style depending on what resolution they have or how they have their window it lets them use your site as they want to.

now that sounds great but obviously it can take a bit more time and knowledge to create a dynamic site but its worth it in the longer run.

Best of luck !

Essentially you would be which is the problem, you could redirect homepage links and go through some of the sub pages find any that may be helpful to your new site but 404 may be better for keeping a high quality site, you could also disavow links from the old domain if you're worried about the cost but Google will remove 404 after a period of time anyhow.

I hope you know have a good idea and can make a better choice now anyway.

And to top all of that off it seems like there was an update on the 8th! it was just a regular one but i can imagine combined with all the issue you've had it was a bit of a perfect storm. Give it a few days to be re crawled and it should adjust. Hopefully this is a very good lesson on why to be very careful with Htaccess.

good luck.

Hi,

It's more what Google perceives to be good however its good you don't have any. Whilst it sucks Google rankings tend to fluctuate you could look at your anchor text which are all over the place (don't worry they look natural) but how many of them are linking to your site (e.g site name). It may be you need to focus a little bit on branding ?

Another step is with some minor research the following suggests something happens on the date you mentioned I would dig into that a bit more maybe too.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17935.html

Sorry if I can't help further they were some suggestions from a couple of minutes thinking.

Hi there,

You've gone down an excellent route of disavowing them having said that the things to consider if the following :

Have you dropped in the rankings?

This is more the case of why you're loosing traffic which is part the the negative SEO,  you wouldn't loose traffic from just links alone although you may find a higher bounce rate.

Have you had a penalty? If not you are at least staying on top.

Have you compared your self to last year?

If you look at July you could say the same thing there was a dip in July is that negative SEO or is it just a seasonal drop? Depending on your site there are seasonal dips in nearly all sites it could jsut be a dip.

Keep up with disavowing and removing links other than that not much you can do, remember while you may be getting hit with negative SEO at least your competitors may be loosing out by spending time and effort on you and not them selves.

there are some great resources on Moz -

http://moz.com/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo

http://moz.com/blog/to-catch-a-spammer-uncovering-negative-seo

Best of luck,  Keep at it!