What To Do If You Have Bad Inbound Links
A reader asked a question on another blog post that I could all readers of this blog could benefit from so I’m going to address it now.
Here’s the question:
Quick question about SEO – I was ranked in the top 3 for over 120 of my target keywords and a “SEO Company” offered to do a free niche search engine submission for free if I would take a look at their services. A week after that happened my rankings dropped on all but about 30 keywords. Any ideas why this would happen?
That’s an excellent question and there’s no easy, quick fix to a situation like this. I would begin by asking the other search engine optimization company to give you a list of places they submitted your link to. Then you should contact those sites and ask if they’ll remove your link. If that SEO company won’t provide you a list of sites then ask them to undo what they did. If they refuse that then you can (and should do this anyway) verify your website with Google Webmaster Tools. Perform a link analysis on your site to see what inbound links you have and identify the ones from bad neighborhoods. Contact those site owners and ask them to remove your links.
If worse comes to worse and the website owners refuse to take down your links or you can’t contact them, look up the Whois information on those sites to see who the web host is. Contact the web host and let them know that they have bad neighborhoods on their servers. A reputable host will remove the sites and shut down those accounts. They will also remove your links.
10 Responses to “What To Do If You Have Bad Inbound Links”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
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Brick Marketing - SEO Company
You will be able to tell if your SEO company is a good seo company – will record all gained links, and the links should be from similar industries with good traffic and pagerank. If it is non of these, then you are probably weakening the good links you have gained. Links from unrelated industries, with no good quality content and a low pagerank will really hurt your website.
@Claire – Great points although I normally don’t look at Google Pagerank at all much these days and focus more on visitors that a client receives from keywords targeted and the ongoing SEO efforts…
30 backlinks killed the SERPS? They must have added the links in really suspicious pages for that to happen. I’m thinking google sandbox.
@Seo Sapien – Not sure if this is a “sandbox” issue as we did not mention 30 inbound links but positioning for 30 keyword phrases took took a hit…
What do the google sandbox, santa claus and the tooth fairy all have in common?
@Chris McElroy – Hahah! LOL!
Put me in touch with your dodgy SEO company and I will have theb link build for all our client’s competitors. Google has gone mad for allowing this to happen.
>> there’s no easy, quick fix to a situation like this
That’s true. Because the one thing almost certain not to be involved is the links gained by the third-party SEO company. Why so sure? Because the original comment claimed it happened just one week after agreeing to have some links built.
Most SEO consultants and agencies have seen this many times. A client gets interested in SEO, does a whole load of things that include an outsource, and when something goes wrong, instantly blame the outsource. But the timeline of just one week from AGREEING to have links built (never mind when/if any actually were) is a big clue that this is highly unlikely to be the cause.
Two main places to look are:
First, how stable the lost rankings were. Could these have been recent results still getting a freshness boost that simply ran out of fresh? Had these positions been steady for at least 3 months prior to the drop?
Second, what else was being done on-site in the six months prior to the drop. In particular, was any form of reciprocal linking used?
@DejanSEO – I agree, it is horrible for clients and the SEO industry as a whole that companies like these still exist!
@Ammon Johns – Great point, I think there is a distinction between black hat and shady SEO companies and clients not understanding the process and building process of SEO and then blaming it on an honest SEO company…Also thanks for the additional tips of where a site could look for additional clues to fix any issues.