SEO – Removing links from your backlink profile
Sometimes, we get a site to look after which has had a less than talented SEO chap look after it and the site has a backlink profile which leaves a little to be desired.
In this case, we had a lot of nofollowed .edu links – it’s easy enough to find old student blogs in the US which have commenting open and in theory gives you a .edu backlink (Lots of US based university and colleges have student blog networks that get forgotten about and leave commenting open).
The link ends up being nofollowed and the blog post gets battered by black hat SEO’s posting links to Britney Spear’s twadge, Viagra or “cheap meds”. In short, it’ll take Google all of about 1 second to work out that the link is worthless. Usually these links are placed by powerful pieces of software which sniff them out. With great power comes great responsibility.
Listen to Spiderman kids, he was right on that one.
It’s not about the link being nofollowed – some of those don’t hurt a backlink profile – but links from a site which is clearly being abused isn’t doing you any good. Have a few of these and it’s probably not doing any harm. Have a few (hundred) thousand and it’s time to clean up.
Here’s what I did
Are you ready? This is rocket scientist stuff this…
- Found the root University page
- Found the right contact details – not always easy but aim to find the webmaster or at least the web faculty contact email
- Write a polite email asking them to remove the link to our site but suggesting that the digital asset is being abused by spammers and doesn’t reflect well on such a well respected seat of learning
- Wait
What happened?
I received an email a week later thanking me for pointing it out to them, thanking me for being so courteous and pointing out that they’d 404′d all of the blogs. Bosh. Links removed.
I did this for a few dodgy links and whilst some have been 403′d rather than 404′d, 90% of the dodgy links that the site had collected have been washed away. All I had to do was ask!
We’ve just got to wait now for our backlink trackers (we use SEOMoz and Majestic) to update their data and we’ll see these fall out of our data reports. Now we can start to get some backlinks from authoritative domains and really help market the site (I’ve a post coming up about how we go about this).