The video above explains how to remove bad backlinks from your Google link profile. Transcript is coming.
Here are the steps:
Step1: Sign up for a free trial at SEOmoz and use the Open Site Explorer tool. Enter your website address (choose All Links-Only External-To all pages on this root domain) and export the excel file.
Step 2: Upload this excel file to Link Detective. After Link Detective does its scan, export the file and do some cleanup by removing duplicate links, duplicate sidebar and footer links, etc.
Step 3: Use Backlink Inventory to scan all these links for a live/dead status. Upload the links, wait for the crawl, and export an excel doc with the results.
Step 4: Combine the two excel doc from Step 2 and Step 3 by sorting both alphabetically and pasting in the status from the Backlink Inventory file. This will now give you a list of all links pointing to your website, what type of links they are, and if they are currently live or dead.
Step 5: Decide what links need to go. Create another sheet from this file for only links you want to remove. If they are spam, profile links, unrelated comments, paid links, etc . . . they need to go.
Step 6: Go to Odesk.com and hire a worker to go to each url and find the email address of the site owner. If there is no contact email, find the conjtact form on the website. If there is no contact form, find the registered email on the whois reciord for the website.
Step 7: Hire the same or another worker to email each website owner and politely ask that they remoce the link. Keep track of this buy uploaded a file to Backlink Invetory every week or so and checking to see how many links get removed. Mark the date contacted, and if the link was removed or not in your excel file. Keep good track of all steps you took.
Step 8: Contact Google. Once you have removed about 75% of the links you chose to remove, go to your Google Webmaster Account and submit a reconsideration request. Include a url to your excel doc and explain to them what you have done. Once they see that you went that far to remove these links, and see the excel file that you kept strict records with, there is a 99.9% chance they will lift the ban and you will regain your ranking!
About the Author
Dan Henry is a professional SEO/Internet Marketor and software developer.
Check out his latest software, Backlink Inventory.
You can also add him on Facebook and ask Internet Marketing Questions.
What if you didn’t get a notice but dropped off the serps? I had that happen to one of my sites where I did not receive the google notice but what was once a number 1 position, suddenly vanished after panda update. Should we still follow this same procedure or is that a different penalty altogether?
Thanks Dan!
Well it depends. Did you not get a notice because you did not have that site connected to a Google Webmaster account? Or was it connected, and you just noticed a big drop? How far did it drop? If it vaished completely, then it is definetly a manual penalty. How long was the site #1? If it was the top spot for only a couple weeks, that could have been a temporary spike from “Google dancing”. Let me know a little more and I will answer your question and tell you what you can do to fix it. Websites can **always** be fixed!