[Build Backlinks Online] Getting Link Removals Wrong

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Getting Link Removals Wrong'

Posted by dohertyjf
Ever since Penguin launched in 2012, SEOs who for years had built less than
savory links, or companies who for years had ridden off the coat tails of these
links, started to ask for links to be removed. I've heard many of my friends,
like Wil Reynolds, repeatedly poo-poo it from the stage (Wil did it during his
now famous "Real Company Shit" talk at Mozcon in 2012).


As someone who has overseen link removal campaigns for clients when I was at
Distilled, I am not down on link removals. They have a place, and I've seen
positive effects from cutting out large chunks of really bad links (porn, pills,
poker, you name it). But, I also believe there are good and bad ways to remove
links, and I want to make an example here.


In the aftermath of Matt Cutts coming out and warning people off from
manipulative guest posting (something all of us have seen and grown more and
more tired of in the past few years), I think a voice of reason is needed to
stop companies from doing more harm than good to themselves. Youâll see an
example of an email I received a few weeks ago, the day after Matt came out with
his proclamation, but letâs cover some basics first before we get into
conjecture.

Why remove links?

I'm not going to give a full diatribe on why you might want to remove links
pointing into your website, as that is not the point of this article. But, here
are some reasons why you may want to remove links -



You aggressively obtained exact match anchor text back on 2008/2009/2010;




Your organic traffic dropped for specific keywords (or rankings plummeted and
did not recover) on or around the days we know Penguin rolled out (Algo History
here)




You're being proactive because you see that Google is increasingly lowering
the barrier to classifying something as spam and you do not want to be caught
out in the cold when the hammer drops



That's a quick overview of link removal, and by no means complete. This one
is.

The guest posting fiasco

For years now, as old tactics have quit being as effective (though many still
work when done as part of a full and balanced campaign), many "SEO" companies
turned to guest posting as a way of getting links.


Many have done it well. They've built great relationships with sites that have
a relevant audience to them, have driven traffic back to their site, and yes,
built a link or two. But notice the order - first comes the business purpose
(customers, traffic) and tertiary is links.


Many other companies have tried to "scale" link building via guest posting,
yet as we all know when you begin to scale something the first to go out the
window is quality. And when you have your boss or client breathing down your
neck to lower the cost per link (which is not the metric to base quality on, but
money is important to keep an eye on), the temptation to outsource outreach or
writing becomes very appealing. Thatâs why weâve ended up with this:




When Matt dropped the hammer a few weeks ago, many companies freaked out and
started getting their guest post links removed, exact anchors and all. To me,
this is stupid on many many levels, such as -



If you wrote the content on a quality site, you should want credit in the
form of a link, Google be damned;




If you are requesting removal and the person is nice enough to remove the
anchor text link, thank them instead of also asking that the branded link be
removed too.




Only manipulative posts are being targeted, and in my opinion if you been
accepting bad poets just to get content on your site, you deserve to have your
site disavowed.


Removal Automation

I'm in favor of automating what you can when it makes sense. Collecting data,
smart algorithms to surface content via internal links, and the like are all
examples of something that can and should be automated.


When we talk about link removal, I'm all in favor of automating the initial
data gathering of sites linking to your page(s) that have been affected. This is
where the automation stops though, because a machine will never be as good as a
human pair of eyes. We're not just removing links from low authority (from a
strictly SEO domain or page authority perspective) sites, but from irrelevant
sites where you placed a link just to get a link.


Outreach should be personal. When you automate the gathering of pages to
request your link be removed from, any SEO worth their salt will immediately see
this. Here is a list of pages on HotPads that a site (redacted) asked that I
remove links from (with an admission that they believe themselves to be
negatively affected by a manipulative links penalty, which SEMrush seems to
indicate as well):




The problem here is that, as you can see, many of these are archive and
category pages. They only have links on the actual guest post (and I was nice
enough to remove the exact anchor. I left the branded link), but sent me this
laundry list because they got it straight from OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSeo,
I'm sure.


The other area you can automate is checking to see if links are still live,
then manually qualifying if they should be or not. Many of the removal tools do
this, or you can upload a list of pages to Scrapebox and see if the links are
still there.


I know link qualification is a tedious process (Iâve looked at tens of
thousands of links to qualify them as good/bad in my career), but putting a
human touch onto your work will long-term benefit you, I believe.

What if my site is disavowed?

Here's a question I've heard posed a few times:


"But won't my site get disavowed if I don't remove the link? Will my site
suffer if I am disavowed?"


No one has studied this yet, mostly because you cannot know if your site has
been disavowed or not. I have to believe that Google can tell
semi-algorithmically if a site is being used for manipulative linking or not.
With how long it takes for a disavow file to seem to take effect, I believe that
disavow lists are manually looked at, and a site may be whitelisted if it is
disavowed, but judged to not be manipulative.


So no, I don't worry about my site being disavowed. If shady work was done in
the past, then clean it up. If your site is clean, carry on.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you some food for thought before removing links or
starting the process. It's a tricky business and can be quite effective when
done well, but can cause more harm if done poorly. Proceed with caution.
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