One who can now state he is 100% clean and has never broken Google guidelines is a lucky guy. I for one cannot say I am the one (are you?).
Who didn’t buy or trade links for “malicious” purposes in the past when Google wasn’t that smart and strict? And now what we have is probably an old established resource with the ‘dirty’ link profile.
It can be still ranked well and receiving solid Google referral traffic. But is it just a matter of time when Google will punish it for those ‘dirty’ links? Is it possible that one day you wake up to find your most successful site nowhere in the SERPs? Would it be wise to clean-up the link profile now before it’s too late?
Wiep Knol, a link building expert, thinks this should be done. In his recent statement in Gyutae Park’s article on building natural links Wiep recommends cleaning up “your past” as an important stage of link building process:
Lastly, cleaning up your past can be wise as well. For example, Google can still see if you (or a previous site owner or SEO agency) have been blatantly buying links in the past, or if you’ve used any other illegal techniques. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing (we’ve all been bad at least once), but cleaning up before you start building new links is probably the best thing to do in such situations.
What’s my personal take? I do believe this should be done if you decide to start clean. But unfortunately my personal experience proves the opposite so far.
I used to have a fairly large network of sites (about 50 IPs and about 10 sites at each). And I operate a large portal site having about 50 inbound links from the network. A year ago I decided to delete all the links. I’ve been deleting them for several months (to ensure the change would be ‘moderate’). I also started a new “white” link building campaign to acquire links instead of those deleted. Unfortunately, the site was dropped out of the SERPs (but it is still in the index) and it still proudly gets zero referral traffic from Google.
Probably, I screwed the process at some stage and that’s not the cleaning-up matter to be blamed for that – I don’t know. The fact is that all the rest of my sites (having plenty of bought links in their profiles) are still doing quite well. Again, probably, that’s just the matter of time.
What I am still sure about is that Google does forgive if you are doing everything right. On another hand, it doesn’t seem to forget – your historical records still matter a lot (so the best way out is to be clean for the very beginning).
And what’s your experience? Do you think the link profile should be cleaned up? How should this be implemented? Cleaning up first – then building new links? Or should these be done simultaneously? Or is better to just keep the things going (and hope that Google won’t punish you for your past sins)?
I have never been a spammer, but it does annoy me when i see others getting away with it and doing the other stuff that fools the search engines…..
The best approach is to avoid link-based optimization as much as possible. It’s inefficient, time-consuming, and a resource hog.
The second best approach is to only engage in holistic link acquisition. It’s still inefficient but you don’t cross any ethical lines and don’t have to go back and clean up your profile if a search engine changes its standards or enforcements.
You don’t think that actually dropping the links had anything to do with it? If building link juice was the reason for putting all the links in place initially, then why wouldn’t it be true that if you removed them, the site’s strength would diminish? Your certainly skreued if you do take them down and only just possibly if you don’t.
Ann you are my favorite author here at SEJ and this is very good article.
About ‘cleaning’ link profile… I think those old links may not harm and I do not recommend removing them till they really matter. Until you get enough authority and then they do not matter anyway… whole thing is logarithmic, what that means? That means if you go to next level of trust, authority, value… all dirty things from previous level have diminishing value… like linking wikipedia from porn and other web sites would not harm it.
Good questions.
What I meant with my comment in Gyutae’s post was that, from my experience, it’s advisable to clean up your link profile when most of the links are obviously paid for or bad in any other way. After all, when you’re planning on attracting lots of attention (for example via widgets or any other link baiting campaign), you want your link profile to look natural for the most at least. It’s not necessary to clean up every single link that looks a little bit dodgy, but make it look natural.
Also, don’t pull away all your links at the same time. Start with the baddest ones and move on slowly from there.
Oh, and thanks for the link, Ann ;)
@Affiliate Marketer, thanks a lot for your kind words!
@Wiep, thanks for the clarification – that definitely makes sense.
I think the mistake you made was deleting the old links. If Google thought they were legit and they suddenly dissappear, thats an idicator that you’re site is no longer any good. Just build good links and if Google one day figures out your bad links, it’ll just filter them out, it’s not like deleting the links will remove the records from Google’s database anyway.
I’d say adding cleaner links is kinda like a safety net, but at the moment I’m not sure it’s really worth it. Best thing to do is try and gather the contact details of your visitors thus having less reliance on search engines in the future.
I’ve cleaned up more than a few sites’ profiles and I have never seen the removal of bad links hurt a site’s rankings in any way.
Search engine optimization is NOT all about links. Links should not make up more than 10-15% of your optimization. But when you’re depending on bad links to begin with, they probably are not helping most sites as much as people have been led to believe.
Certainly after a few months a lot of paid links seem to lose their juice and vitality.
Hey Ann…good stuff again.
@Michael – I would highly disagree with you on the 10-15% of optimization. You will not rank for any decent keyword without the right number of quality links. You can do all the on page optimization you like, but it won’t take you that far in the serps.
@Ann – I do about 10 hours a week analyzing backlink profiles for clients and their competitors and I’ve noticed one thing over and over again….bad link building practices.
I’ve been working with a handful if clients if very tough niches and almost every top competitor is doing tons of recip link exchanges, thousands of dollars in paid links and other not so quality methods. It’s dirty but I just don’t see Google putting the smack down enough. The majority of these sites do have age and quality content on their side, so I’m really wondering just how far an authority site can go with bad practices. I’ve even seen the BBC recently selling do follow text links to affiliate marketing pages.
@Ryan, you are quite right. So far my experience is the same. It is so hard to explain to a client why I don’t want to do what ALL their successful competitors were and ARE doing.
Hi…Ann
good post as you give helpful information every time….it will help to all link builder…and link builder will take care of their link building campaigns after reading that.
What can you do about websites that sell links but include you in their listings because it makes them look good. Said another way, I never paid for inclusion – they just listed our site without my approval.
RYAN: ” I would highly disagree with you on the 10-15% of optimization. You will not rank for any decent keyword without the right number of quality links. You can do all the on page optimization you like, but it won’t take you that far in the serps.”
WRONG. I rank in competitive queries without relying on backlinks all the time.
So does Wikipedia.
I would say that if both Wikipedia and I can do that, anyone can do it. I’m hardly comparable to Wikipedia, so clearly there is a huge flexibility range at work in the algorithms.
Links are just not as important as the SEO community has brainwashed itself to believe they are.