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I've done this to several of our other sites and haven't seen a ranking increase or decrease. They have all continued to have roughly the same amount of organic traffic. So I'm assuming these links were really doing nothing from an SEO standpoint and probably a ticking time bomb ready to go off when the next major algo update rolls out.

I may have just gotten a little overzealous when removing them on this particular site. It was for a pretty significant keyword so I'm tempted to maybe restore at least some of them and see what it does.

I meant links to the homepage of a site from other sites that we happen to own.

So  I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before?

I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this?

Thanks

Generally speaking if I am just moving a couple of articles from one site to another I need to 301 redirect those old URL's to the new ones right? And even if a webpage doesn't have any links pointing to it, it is best practice to employ 301 redirects correct? After a while, after Google etc. has crawled the new location of the content you can then delete the old URL, is that right? And if other sites are linking to the old location they should be notified of the new location but even if a page has links pointing to it, is it best practice to delete that page after Google has crawled the new and you've notified the webmaster?

I've think I've got this right, I just want some clarification on this issue. Thanks.

Thanks Paul, I'm more curious about how and why these links are created.

That feed url link is coming from my own site but I'm not sure how it was created and/or how to delete them. Any ideas?

Weird, I can't figure it out either which is why I'm here

I'm using Open Site Explorer for the backlink report.

Okay thanks, what about a feed url like this one? http://ldsimages.com/category/uncategorized/feed. Open site explorer is showing it as linking to this site; mormonbeliefs.org, with [No Anchor Text]. How is that link being generated?

Is this an RSS feed link? How was this page generated?

http://blog.moregoodfoundation.org/category/technology/feed

What causes it to show up as a backlink in open site explorer? And how would you go about removing these links? Lots of questions there

Thank you.

I am using cross domain rel=canonical to a page that is very similar to mine. I feel the page adds value to my site so I want users to go to it, but I ultimately want them to go to the page I'm canonicalizing to. So I am linking to that page as well. Anyone foresee any issues with doing this? And/or have other suggestions? Thanks.

We do have permission.

Does anyone else have anymore insight into this?

It's the full book.

Okay, makes sense, thank you. But what if it is just some other random site that has also published the books content (there are many that have published parts of this book) and none are the owner. Who do you canonicalize to, do you just pick one at random? That wouldn't seem to accomplish what Google is after by using the rel=canonical tag.

It is a book we don't own, either. Would you need to somehow find the original and rel=canonical it? Or is this just all around bad to do? Thanks.

I manage a wordpress based site that is needing to under go a site architecture overhaul. the site is christ.org and one of the problems is it has 89 pages but really only 4 are navigatable (not a word apparently).

The site also has over 400 posts so categories and parent pages are both definitely needed. One option is I convert a lot of the pages into posts, but would that happen to break any links pointing to those pages turned posts? Or another option is to keep the pages and posts and create a bunch of subpages, then I would most likely end up with similarly named categories and top level pages. I would guess the name of the category needs to be unique from page titles right? And not just unique but very much differentiated than any page title (not posts but page titles).

Maybe what I need to do is convert the pages that are not really unique into posts and put them in the category it fits with. And then keep those that are unique as top level pages.

The architecture needs some serious work I think Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar?

This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind:

“Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.”

What are your thoughts? Thanks

I manage the seo for a bunch of different websites. We currently have a problem with links from low quality sources.... way too many of them and then way too much exact match anchor text.

We have a lot of sites that we basically linked together (blog network) and we are in the process of correcting this. We know we have a lot of links we need to remove and/or anchor text we need to rewrite. My question is how do I know which ones to remove and/or edit. I know that having some links from low quality sources isn't bad, or links from some other sites you own, or having some exact match anchor text. I know this isn't all bad, and some of it is expected but we have a LOT of this going on.

So basically I need to make decisions on each and every link as to whether we want to keep it, edit the anchor text, nofollow it, or delete it. I'm just not sure of what the best action is that should to be taken for each link. Any help would be really appreciated.

http://jesus.christ.org/

If you browse around on there you will see what I'm talking about with the low quality links, or if you run it through open site explorer you will really see what I mean

Thank you, I hope to get some responses soon.

Is it still giving you problems? Does anyone else have this problem?

On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"):

And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate.

http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend

http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ

There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.