Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Do It YourSelf Mayank Jain
Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Table of Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. How To Spot a Backlink 4 3. Tools to Collect the Backlinks 7 4. Time to do backlinks Analysis 12 5. I have everything. Time to Clean up 17 6. Finding the Email Contacts of Websites Owners 24 1 7. Sending Emails to Webmaster 28 8. Email Clean Up: Monitor Your Sucess 31 9. E-mail Templates 33 End Words 37
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Introduction The following pages contain important information to spot your poor backlinks and to remove them as successfully as possible. How to collect the backlinks, how to filter healthy and poor backlinks with logical explanations and how to get them removed manually step by step is the main agenda behind writing this tutorial. In addition, a separate sample workable sheet (Based on Google docs) will be provided to you so as to summarize all your efforts and to monitor the success of your Link Detection and Removal Program. 3 I have written this tutorial after working with many clients who either got a warning from Google or have suffered a sudden drop in the rankings over the night. Backlink (Poor ones) removal helped them to get those rankings back on the track in most of the cases. After scanning a lot of queries in Google Products Forums, discussions and my customer queries, I decided to put all of my experience on a piece of paper and now, anyone who is business owner/blogger can utilize this step by step approach and get their poor backlinks removed quickly. This tutorial is absolutely free and if you find it useful, please do not forget to share it with your friends.
Link Detection & Removal Made Easy How To Spot A Poor Backlink And How To Remove It An Oversight Days are gone when a link could be used to point to a website without the threat of negative impact on the site. The important thing in the minds of many SEO agencies or link builders was the Page Rank and specifically, the Page Rank of the Page. Their ideas were not even close to the consideration of domain. Panda and Penguin updates hit many sites in last 2 years and Google sent out a warning letter to webmasters about the unnatural links. There are many penalties in Google but our focus is to work up on the penalties which are related to links. Sometimes, you may not receive any warning in Google webmaster tool but you will realize a sudden drop in your traffic or suddenly your SERP may go down for those keywords which used to rank well. This is an alarming situation and it forces to think how it happened. It can be one or other kind of penalty where you may not get any message in GWT. In this case, you need to watch your link profile closely and if you find any trouble with it, you need to get your poor links removed fast. I have come across many blogs talking about Google Zebra update which is not yet confirmed but most likely, it is going to target fake social profiles followers which are solely made to manipulate the Social Impact on the ranking algorithm. Wait, Google is not fool! If you are involved in such activities, let me explain it you where are you making a big mistake. When you publish any content and if it holds poor quality or nothing exclusive is added to knowledge of visitor, they immediately close the page and hence, your bounce rate increases. No need to explain, Google has this data as you have set-up analytics on your own, right? 4
Now, think about the situation when you add fake likes by some Fiverr Gig and over the night, you get 400 G+ and 3000 Tweets for the page you want to promote, what will be your bounce rate? You come into suspicious category to Google. I am quite sure that they have other tracking tools like Fake G+ as they own it. Whether it s link building or social shares, if you want to rank well, you must have top level content to connect to your visitors. I hope it clears your doubt about Social Signals in Rankings. Can anyone predict the next Google Update and which Animal will be used to symbolize it except Zebra? Do not laugh after this Statement: 5 Penguin contains black and white color and so is Panda and Zebra. This is mainly based on the concept of differentiation between White Hat and Black Hat. Pick all the species and check that has this combination. Jokes apart, let s focus on the topic for which this tutorial is written. For an experiment SEO consultant, it is not new but my focus is to help small business owners/webmasters who play a little around SEO and are not updated with latest Google changes. We need to know that traditional link building has gone where we simply needed the backlinks from High PR sites. SEO experts must agree to the fact that we all did some mistakes which are not well documented anywhere in guidelines but yes, we did and it is good to accept it. Now, the problem comes up when we want to spot such backlinks and we do not know if our SEO Agency is giving the correct report or not. We can even hire some tools to know if a link is good or not. This article will help many users in Google Webmaster Forum as well as those who are working to spot such backlinks and removing them.
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Tools To Collect The Backlinks We need tools (both free and paid) to collect the backlinks. Please note that just one tool will not work for us and our Goal is to identify as many backlinks as possible. Let s start collecting the backlinks step-by-step in a sequential manner: A) Google Webmaster Tool 7 I hope you must be familiar with Google Webmaster tool which is free and caters to many other operations for which many other companies are charging considerable $$ per month. i. Login to webmaster tool, select your site and then click on Search Traffic Links to Your site. ii. iii. iv. You will see who links to your site the most. Click on more to find out all the links. Once the detailed link page opens, click on Download More Sample Links and save it in CSV,.xlsx or Google docs. v. Let s keep it simple and provide the file a simple name, say Backlinks_1.xlsx.
The problems with Google Webmaster Tool backlinks: i. It shows the backlinks which were made in past and deleted and now, do not exist. ii. iii. It does not show the recently created links. It does not show all the possible links. But the beautiful part is: It is free and we all like free services, especially in the field of Internet Marketing. B) Majestic SEO Majestic SEO comes with site explorer which you can access from here: Link i. Enter your domain name and click on search button. This will open a Summary page. ii. iii. Click on backlink Tab and choose Hide Deleted Backlinks. Download the report. Let s name it Backlinks_2.xlsx. Important feature which I find valuable here is: Trust Flow. We need it for the later stages of analysis. C) Open Site Explorer Open site explorer provided by MOZ (Previously known as SEOMoz) is another good tool to collect backlink data. 8
i. Enter the domain name and click on search. You will find inbound links. ii. Export the data to CSV and keep it as Backlinks_3.xslx. Important feature which I find valuable here is: Domain Authority. We need it for the later stages of analysis. D) Ahref I am not a great fan of this tool because of its high license fee but it sure has some commendable features which any of the above mentioned tools do not possess. Since our aim is to locate all the possible links, we are doing this exercise. i. In the site explorer, enter the domain name and save the file as Backlinks_4.xslx. 9 Important feature which I find valuable here is: Link Location i.e. Sidewide, Footer, Text, Edu, Gov, etc. E)SEO SpyGlass: In the early days, SEO SpyGlass used to fetch the data from Yahoo site explorer and other search engines like Google, etc. but now SEO SpyGlass ( a product of Link Assistant ) is one of the best tools not only for link detection but also to check the existence of live link. Now-a-days, SEO SpyGlass also helps keep the data of the backlinks in their backend which also helps in collecting the backlinks. You can find upto 1000 backlinks for free but if you want more, you will be charged which works for years if you do not upgrade for the technology upgrades.
Run the SSG and click on New Project. Enter the URL/Domain and click the Next button. Click on the radio button to see the expert options on next screen. You can find the backlinks based on your country and Search engines, select what you feel like based on your requirements then click on Next. You need to add the resource pool from where you want to fetch the links, check all the options you like and then click on next. This tool will start automatically and based on your Internet speed, it will find live backlinks. Save this file as Backlinks_5.xslx. 10
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Time To Do Backlink Analysis Now, you have got all the possible backlinks. This is the right time to put them in one excel sheet and start analyzing the links which are not good for the site in question. Let s do it step by step : Step 1: Place all the backlinks on one sheet in a single row in Microsoft Excel, then click on DATA and click on Remove Duplicate. You will find around 40-60% of data is deleted as it was fetched from different tools and contains the same backlinks sometimes more than once. Let s give a name to this Sheet TotalBacklinksfound.xslx Step 2: Open SEO SpyGlass again. Click on New Project: Expert Options Enter backlinks Manually A pop up will open. In the first box, enter the URL under question and then in the second box, paste all the links collected in Step1. Check the Box Show Expert Options on next Screen and click on Next. Step 3: You will see a screen. Choose Backlink Factors, uncheck everything and then select Page Info only and Click on Next button. This process will check if all entered backlinks are pointing to your website or not. Step 4: Once the processing at step 3 is over, you will see all the backlinks along with a column named Link Back and another column named Domain. Sort out the column Link Back and if you find anything other than YES or Not Yet Checked, delete it. Keep Not Yet Checked and 12
Yes into the SSG. The links we have deleted are either no follow or no link or link missing or page not found types which are of no interest to us. If the status of some of the links is: NOT YET CHCKED, Run the step 3 again only for those backlinks and re-work on step 4. My agenda is to get the backlinks with YES value in column Link Back. It means all of those links are DoFollow links. Step 5: Now, you have finally found the live links which may or may not be causing you any trouble in SERP. Let s find out some important factors using SEO SpyGlass here. Click on update where you have all the live links and update its Alexa, Age, IP and PR. Once, you are done, save the file as TotalLiveBacklinks.xslx( You can use CTR+C and CTR+V ) Open this sheet which I created to make you understand the better process. Update all of your data here. Now, you are going to hit your head to get a better overview of bad backlinks. You can see it does not contain Trust Flow, Domain Authority, Link Location, Link Type, Malware, Domain Index in Google and Social Found. We did not fill these information fields as we are going to do it step by step. Step 6: Go to Majestic SEO and find the trust flow for each of the domains and mention it for every domain. Step 7: Go to SEOMOZ and collect the Domain Authority Value of each domain and update the excel sheet. You can also use a free tool to update DA. 13
Step 8: Now, you have to open each and every URL to check if it has Malware (Warning), Link Location, Link Type, Social Found, and Relevancy and if Domain is index in Google. Following link locations are possible: Sidebar (BlogRoll) Footer Contextual Author Bio Signature Header (Mostly not found) Types of Link From and within the body of content Article Directory Web Directory Social Bookmarks Infographic Images Blog Comment Forum Discussion Forum Profile Guest Book ( Not Guest post ) Web 2.0 Classified Press Release.. 14
.... Many More.. Social Found: If a site does not have a social profile or has a low quality social profile, chances are they do not want to be updated with social media changes or they do not want to be public. It is also possible that they may be using some bad SEO techniques to promote their sites or do not have time to maintain the website. Domain Index in Google: If you enter the complete domain URL without http and www into Google and do not find the site in search results, then it means that Google has already de-indexed the site due to one or other penalties. The links that lead to these penalties are really harmful for your site. Malware: If you open a website and you get a warning message, this means that the site is either hacked or is hit by some malicious program or virus. Any backlink from such a website will be considered a bad backlink. Relevancy: If a site is not relevant to your niche, kindly mark it as Non Relevant and if it is, mark it as Relevant. 15
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy I Have Everything! Time To Clean UP! This is the time we were waiting for. Let s mark the link RED or whatever the color you want and mention To Be Deleted (TBD) in action column. Rule1: Mark TBD for all the links where domain is not indexed in Google. Rule2: Mark TBD for all the links where domain is found with a warning message. Rule3: Mark TBD for all the domains where Alexa is 0 because it implies that the traffic is 0. There is no one who can initiate successful link building or can cater to its audience. Sooner or later, the site may go into deep penalty. Rule 4: Mark TBD for all the links coming from Article Directory, Web Directory, Classifieds, Poor Web 2.0, Wikis, Blog Comments ( If made for link building), and Forum Profile links. Rule 5: If domain age is less than 1 year and Page Rank is more than 4, then possibly it is a sign of Black Hat work and the site will either go into penalty or lose its rank. With my personal experience, I would say that it s better to mark TBD for this as well but I leave it to you to decide. Rule 6: If Domain Authority is less than 10 and site age is more than 1 year, it means that this site cannot do well in future in terms of traffic and SEO. Mark TBD against this too. Rule7: If Majestic trust flow is less than 10, mark TBD in front of that too. 17
Important Note: Majestic Trust Flow and Domain Authority value depends on your competitors backlinks. You can check top 3 competitors of yours and find their backlinks and can perform complete analysis on their DA and Trust flow. Later, find the average value of each and use it for your reference. Rule 8: If link is found in Footer or Sidebar, mark it as TBD. Rule 9: If you do not get any social signals like Twitter, FB, G plus etc., mark it in TBD list. Rule 10: If you find that the site is not relevant to you, mark it as TBD. Rule 11: Once you are through with all the above 10 rules, sort the file based on IP addresses and if you find that two or more sites are hosted on Same IP address, mark it as TBD because it can be a possible Blog Network. The links which are left now without TBD are healthy links which need further purification. This involves quite an advanced level of study which is beyond the scope of 90% of the readers. So, I am keeping the scope of this tutorial limited as of now. Save Healthy Links of your site in another excel sheet. Name the sheet as Healthylinks.xslx. Now, we have all the possible bad backlinks which need to be removed but here, we need patience as the tedious process will start now. We need to place the email addresses of the website owners and if we do not find it directly, we will have to search the Webpages of the site and their contact forms. 18
Advanced Rules I would recommend this should be used by experienced link builders and if any self-learner is going to start with advanced rules to find the backlinks, he/she must be seriously cautious: Rule 12: Check out the DoFollow ( outbound links ) links on the page, if it is more than 10, please consider it in the deletion list. Rule 13: Checkout if the site is made only for Guest Blogging. If it is so, then the site will soon come under the radar of Google. Get rid of these sites too. Rule 14: If you want to check if the owner of this site is running multiple sites, you may need to check if site has AdSense Account. Right click on the site View Source Search for google_ad_client you will find something like this: google_ad_client = "ca-pub- 1488632370775678". This clearly states that the site is running Google AdSense. If the website owner running multiple blogs/sites, we can check it nicely by this feature, go to http://www.cybeye.com/ Enter the site you want to examine for a possible blog network and hit the search button. Once, the report is loaded, you need to find Google AdSense Account and click on the link. You will be able to see if website owners are running more sites with same AdSense ID and you can easily conclude it as a sort of blog network. 19
For example: We can see that there are 10 more sites attached to Blogcatalog.co.in because their AdSense ID is same. You can also use the following site for multiple traces: http://reverseinternet.com/analytics/ Rule 15: Similar to AdSense, another way of find out sites using Google Analytics code. Get the Google Analytics Code from view source as explained above. This will look like the following: UA-38433507-1 All you need here is a reverse Google Analytics lookup tool.ewhois offers one for free. Simply plug the anonymous domain name of the blogger 20
whose identity you want to determine into ewhois and it will show you what other sites share the same Google Analytics account. It will also show you for which sites the blogger is using the same Google AdSense ID. This is evidence that proves that both sites are owned by the same person. Profound apologies to Matt Cutts for using his site in this example! A disturbing load of information! That s why Andy Baio suggests all anonymous bloggers who wish to protect their identity to use a completely separate set of accounts for anonymous blogging activities separate Google Analytics, separate email, separate domain registrar, separate web hosting. 21
ewhois isn t the only available tool for spying on unaware bloggers. Services like DomainTools offer a chilling history of your domain and nameserver changes including record of all domains you own. This information can be bought by anybody for as low as $10 per month. It s surprising how many anonymous bloggers are so naïve about anonymity on the Internet. They take all precautions for hiding their identity such as hiding personal info in the domain record and using a different IP address from their other sites but they finally slip-up by sharing the same Google Analytics account. Rule 16: If a domain age is more than 2 years and there is no PR or 0 PR, the domain owner is not working on its SEO portion and hence, this link can harm or will not pass any value to your site. It is better to remove it. 22
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Finding the Email/Contacts of Websites Owners You have done a tremendous amount of work. You have got the big list of link removal. The main objective here is to find out the contact person of these domains which is not so easy. This is a little time consuming process and someone who is doing this task should be very patient Sort out the domain names and make a list. Copy and paste the list in the sheet mentioned above as well for your reference here:- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0asgwy8vdvatddfriwe1wyzhmqut axzbky3dwcfdtu3c#gid=1 Now, there are several tools which can provide you with the list of the website owners if she/he is not privately protected. Step 1: Copy the first 100 domains, click on below mentioned URL and paste the list here: http://www.bulkseotools.com/bulk-whois-lookup.php I know you will be able to find 40-60% of contact emails but the work still remains the same. Step 2: Now, you are left with the domain names where the ewhois information is protected. Let s go to ewhois.com again. 24
Place the domain name under question in the search box and go to Reverse Lookup tab. You will find Reverse IP Lookup & Reverse Google Analytics ID Lookup. Here you may or may not find some other domains listed which are owned by the same person. This can help in identifying if he/she is using the same AdSense/IP/Analytics account under his name for multiple other websites as well. So, the catch here is to spot his email address using these other domains which may or may not be privately protected. Step 3: You did a lot of stuff to find the email address of webmaster or domain owner but still you are left with 30-40% of such domains to be worked on. Let s work on their website now. i. Try to find if they have any contact us form. ii. iii. If not, check if they have mentioned any email or phone number on About Us Page. If not, check if they have mentioned any phone no. or email on Contact Us page. Mention those pages/email/phone numbers in your list in the Domain sheet Step 4: Now, you need to perform a small trick. Mark the places where you found some information but they were privately protected. Do not send them email for link removal. Instead, ask them if they can do a paid guest post for you and greed them good amount of money of around $200 in exchange of a text links, sidebar links or display banner or even a guest post. 45% of the times, we have seen that they revert and all you needed was the email to mention that in your domain list tool. 25
Step 5: Oops! You are still left with 10-20% of the domains without any information of their email owners. Now, we have to throw arrows in the dark with some intelligence. Most of the sites have some similar email addresses and you have to apply the hit and trial game here. Let s see what we can do here: Info@domainname.com Sales @domainname.com Webmaster@domainname.com Contact@domainname.com Support@domainname.com Admin@domainname.com Write such emails in the domain sheet and separate them by comma (,).I know this is not what you wanted but this is how it is and we have to face it. Collect your breath because you did an awesome job which most of the SEO companies would not be able to do for you and I really appreciate your efforts if you are reading this workable article and working step-bystep as mentioned. Pro-Tip: This is really a working tip for web directories. Most of the web directories are designed in a manner that you can easily pay for the featured link. The amount is around $5- $15. Submit anything in their form and most likely, this goes to payment gateway PayPal where you can see the email of the person who is receiving the payment ;-) 26
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Sending The Emails to Website Owners Before we send out the emails, we need to plan our schedule with the answers of following questions: i. How fast you need to get rid of bad backlinks? ii. iii. What if the email is a failure and returned? What if a webmaster is not responding though the email that you sent? iv. What if webmaster is replying but asking for money? v. What kind of email I should be sending out? Warning email, Friendly email or Strict email. vi. What if a webmaster is able to remove your link but is asking you for a reason to delete the link? Here are the answers: i. Immediate but I want to make a plan. (Let s say within 30 days) ii. Try to find alternate email id or contact form or bribe. iii. Send out email on Regular interval because we found that webmasters are lazy on such sites as they receive hundreds of emails same as yours. 28
iv. Depends how rich your business is or how fast you want to move up in the ranking. I advise to pay a maximum of $10 but only if you cannot do it on your own. v. I will be giving you such an example soon. Email Templates section will cover this. vi. Give a proper reason why you want this to be done. Read the rules mentioned above and that is why we have categorized the site under specific rule. 29
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy Email Cleanup: Monitor Your Success Rate So how should we contacting a webmaster. Let s make it simple. You have domain yourdomain.com for this example: i. Make an email on your domain name e.g. linkremovalhelp@yourdomain.com ii. Add your pretty clear signature with your Name, Address, Phone number and social profiles. iii. iv. Do not show them that you have hired someone who did it by mistake because webmaster is not a fool. They know you are doing it purposely because you took their time when you were making such links and now they need to work again on removal part. When the links were made, the intentions were to take your Site on Google s first page and you forced yourself or your link building company to do it fast. At the end of the day, it s you and only you who should be responsible for this. Webmasters are already pretty frustrated and that is why they ask for money most of the times or they do not respond. Email should be having such sensitiveness to show your urgency but sympathy to the webmaster. Give them an offer. If they are not able to do it, we can hire a developer to help you for this request or for other requests too. v. Ask them if they can accept donation of any amount to compensate the efforts they place while approving the link and while deleting it as well. vi. Ask them if they have any business goals which they are not able to take up further with on-going Google changes. 31
Guys! Believe it or not, due to so many Google changes, many webmasters do not even check their emails and many with whom I have worked in the past have lost their interests because they do not have any business left and hence, they ask you for money for the link removal process. Please be polite with them in first 3 emails and if you see no result, you can always tell them that unfortunately we have to put your domain in disavow tool which is not a good situation. We have to do it in order to keep our site alive. In the following templates, I am not going to explain where to add sympathy to webmasters but it is your job based on how the conversation goes. TIP: If you are bribed for a heavy amount for link removal, you can negotiate up to 70% is what I have seen. Something is always better than nothing! 32
Link Detection & Removal Made Easy E-mail Templates First Letter Sub : Help Needed for Google Penalty. Response Requested. Dear Webmaster/Owner, We wish to thank you for linking from : [Link URL 1] [Link URL 2] to our site [Your Domain/ URL] Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that this link is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. It is important for us to bring our site into compliance with Google's terms. Please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site. Thank you, [Signature ] Or Add this Line : Please add a rel="nofollow" or remove our link from this page and any other page on your site. If you have any questions, please let us know. 33
Good Follow up Sub : Follow-up Removal Request. Please Respond. Hello Webmaster/Owner, We are following up regarding the link on [Link URL 1] [Link URL 2] To our site [Your Domain/ URL] We appreciate your efforts to promote our website; however, we have received notification from Google that our site does not comply with their terms. We wish to seek reconsideration as soon as possible and must have this link removed in order to bring our site into compliance. Please note, as part of our reconsideration request, we have to report to Google any link we are unable to remove. Please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site. Thank you, [Signature] Or Add this Line : Please add a rel="nofollow" or remove our link from this page and any other page on your site. If you have any questions, please let us know. 34
Second Good Follow up Sub : URGENT: Please Respond; Help Needed for Google Penalty Hello Webmaster/Owner, We have tried to contact you several times regarding the link on [Link URL 1] [Link URL 2] To our site [Your Domain/ URL] This link is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and must be removed in order to bring our site into compliance with Google's terms. We are assembling a reconsideration request and will be submitting it to Google, soon. Again, all links which we could not remove will be included in the information we submit. Please remove the link from your site and notify us when this has been done, so that we do not include your site information in our submission. Thank you, [Signature] Or Add this Line : Please add a rel="nofollow" or remove our link from this page and any other page on your site. If you have any questions, please let us know. 35
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Link Detection & Removal Made Easy End Words I hope the information provided here will be useful for you. If you have further suggestions, I will be more than happy to see them and include them in this tutorial. The methods applied here are the practical approach for link detection and removal. Though it takes time and efforts, yet this is really important to do this or else you know that you are not going to see your site in top pages Google again. To keep your success high, keep on counting the responses: How many emails have failed? How many emails lead to link removal or NoFollow? How many webmasters asked for money? How many times have you contacted the webmasters? Try to get more in-depth analysis where your emails are failing and keep on trying this for at least 30 days. If you are not lucky with some sites to get your link removed, I advise you to show your efforts to Google using my sheet and prepare a disavow file and submit it to Google but never before you have done all the steps mentioned above. 37
Note: You can also hire our team do all the tasks mentioned above at a very reasonable pricing. Hope, you enjoyed this tutorial. Please do not forget to connect me on your social profiles: LinkedIn http://in.linkedin.com/pub/mayank-jain/b/267/614 Google Plus https://plus.google.com/110029693944433759912 Twitter Website Blog https://twitter.com/prologicseo www.1seo1.com http://prologicwebsolutions.com/blog/ For further material on this topic, stay tuned Thanks, Mayank Jain 38