Search Engine Optimisation

Should You Consider a Link Clean Up?

August 2, 2014

One of the key factors that can penalise your website’s search rankings is having paid, broken or irrelevant links. While fixing up poor quality content is relatively straightforward, doing a link clean up is often no easy feat! Apart from the fact that it can take quite a bit of time and effort, you may also be doing your site a disservice if you try to remove a lot of old links all in one go. After all, some of the suspect links may actually be driving traffic to your site, and naturally you don’t want to interfere with that if you don’t have to.

So how do you know when to do a clean up?

This can be a little tricky to decide. If you have received an obvious manual or algorithmic penalty from Google, then it’s clear you should consider a link clean up. If you only suspect your site might have been affected, you might need to do a little digging to find out if you actually have been penalised by Google’s link algorithm (known as Penguin), or if another issue is affecting your SEO.

If you do decide to do a clean up, the following guidelines should help you decide when and how to go about it.

To clean-up or not to clean-up?

  1. You’ve been manually penalised: Let’s say you’ve received a message from Google that says something like “some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques that are outside of Google’s webmaster guidelines”. Well as indicated above, you don’t have a lot of choice there, and you’d better get onto it straight away.
  2. You are not ranking as well as you used to: This could be for any number of reasons. If you have worked hard on content and on-page quality issues and things have not improved, you might just have a backlink issue. There are tools around to determine if you have been ‘Penguin-slapped’.
  3. Your site is going pretty well, but…: You know you have some unnatural backlinks and you are concerned about it coming back later to bite you. You could leave them well alone in this case, but if it’s keeping you awake at night, you might want to start tackling the problem to be on the safe side. If you decide on the latter, this may require a cautious approach to make sure you don’t throw out any babies with the bathwater!

Tips for major clean ups

In this case, you should start by running a backlink report, using suitable tools such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Arehfs backlink report tool. Once you have collected your backlink data, we recommend:

  • Collating all your link data into a spreadsheet.
  • Ranking links according to level of risk. High-risk examples include links to duplicate content or to dodgy-looking sites, those that have no relevance to your site or industry, and paid links.
  • Taking steps to remove bad links. For instance, stop paying for links, and /or contact the relevant site webmasters requesting that your links be removed.
  • Using Google’s Disavow tool if necessary, to ask Google to ignore bad links you have not been able to eliminate.
  • Keeping a log of all your activities.

Doing a gradual clean up

This involves following the basic procedures above, but removing only a few links at a time while also building up new, natural and relevant links.

Links are still a major factor when it comes to SEO – so do make sure to educate yourself on ethical link building in order to minimise the chance of having to do clean ups in the future!

Discover how we can help with SEO and Back Links

Enquire Now
By Bill Vasiliadis

By Bill Vasiliadis

Bill Vasiliadis is one of Australia’s leading digital marketers, having over 24 years of experience in the industry. With a Master of Digital Marketing degree and a Bachelor of Computer Science degree, he has tremendous knowledge and experience.

Related Articles

View All Articles

“It has been a pleasure working with Bill and his team from SEO for Small Business Australia. The results from all his work have been truly amazing and in no time our business was on the first page of Google. I will continue to work with Bill and his team in the future and highly recommend him.”

Sherleen Chand, Criminal Lawyers Sydney

“We started using Bill last year and have been very happy with his service since. He is incredibly responsive and is generally available to answer the phone or an email when we need it. We have noticed improvements in several areas of our SEO and are keen to see what the next steps in our SEO strategy bring. We would definitely recommend engaging SEO for Small Business Australia Pty Ltd.”

Katie McGovern, Patricia Holdings

“It’s been a pleasure to work with Bill from SEO for Small Business Australia. The results have been amazing. We are kept up to date regularly with what’s going on and the customer service has been great. As a small business, it’s always a pleasure to work with another competent small business.”

Murray Roach, Billabong Spas

“Bill has been a great in getting our SEO set up and running for our meditation business.”

Mairead Ball, Bondi Meditation Centre

“If you are looking for SEO services for small business, this is definitely the one - knowledgeable, easy to work with and great value.”

Nancy Wang, RivetLab Pty Ltd

“I highly recommend Bill Vasiliadis and SEO for Small Business Australia – as a new business, the best decision we made was to engage Bill Vasiliadis.”

Ted Neaves, Shoalhaven Lawyers

“A very professional no-nonsense approach which we appreciated. Makes everything easy to understand and is very clear on the improvements he can deliver. ”

Andrw Harvey, The Optical Co

“After trusting in two other SEO companies over the last 5 years and getting horrible results, 5 months ago I started with Bill and the results have been great and we have only been doing business with him for a short time so I'm super confident that my business's future is going to be amazing. I highly recommend trusting Bill and his team.”

Robin Wickens, Sheepskin Tailors

“Great service with great results, highly recommend.”

Marnie Fawns, Tri to Swim

“Bill has been great to work with and has provided good results.”

Brian Scales, Glen Erin at Lancefield

“Bill has detailed knowledge of SEO, we are a demanding client that has some robust measurements on our ROI and Bill manages to find solutions and report back in line with our KPI's on a weekly basis.”

Graham Budinger, Signal Advantage

“Bill from SEO for Small Business Australia has been great. Easy to deal with, flexible with small business budgets, and already achieving great results.”

Lyn Fisher, Moss Furniture

“Extremely impressed with Bill and his team. The work they did was really in-depth & thorough. Within just a few days I was at the top of the second page of Google, and Bill has given me advice to further increase my rankings. I highly recommend them to anyone who needs SEO help.”

Jordy Fabian, Organised Simplicity

Check Out Our SEO Services

Read More >
Reviewing SEO Analysis

Get Your Free SEO Analysis

Read More >