Finding Webmasters When SEO Demands a Link Clean Up

Bad links can destroy your site rankings

If your website has been slipping down the rankings for a while and you have tried everything to sort out the problem, chances are bad links are ruining your credibility with the search engines. For better SEO you need to flush out the bad links and this often means contacting the webmasters of the relevant sites to ask them politely to help you sort out the issue. The trouble is that once you have identified the source of the problem, getting in touch with the human who needs to do their half of the work is often a frustrating process.

A series of dead ends

It may be that their contact form doesn’t generate any response, and the contact details posted on their site lead to a dead end. Any social networking presence they appear to have is not a real person and when you look on WHOIS the details have been kept private. It may also be the case that the website is subject to deindexing. From a SEO link point of view it can be tricky to know where to go next.

Try to trace them via their webhosting

If possible look at the IP and see if other websites have the same one, approaching it from the webhosting angle. Unfortunately many thousands of websites may be sharing this address. If for the sake of your SEO you are really desperate to get a hold of this webmaster because otherwise your site cannot survive, then it is data you will have to consider sifting through.

Look for their other websites

It is usually the case that a person who has set up a monetized website in one instance will have replicated their system a few times, so they will have other traceable websites somewhere on the web. Their efforts to stay unknown can be flawed because they are not smart enough at SEO to cover their tracks effectively on every single website they create.

Affiliate websites

This may include people who set up affiliate websites, and they can be traced through the identification of the affiliates they work with. Having found the contact details of the affiliates, it is sometimes possible to get through to the webmaster they are dealing with, or their own webmaster for details of the party you are trying to trace.

Use their Adsense codes

Many websites who take SEO seriously use Adsense and this kind of link can be used to trace back to the bad links you are trying to remove on your site. The code generally starts with ‘google ad client’ plus a 16 digit code, and from there you can trace other sites with the same code on them. This may not dredge up all of the sites you need to trace but will generate some of the addresses linked to that unique code number. The system called Blekko can assist you in this tedious but necessary task for cleaning up your bad links.

Link Detox: You Can Diagnose Bad Links | Search Engine Journal – Link Detox is a new tool created by the CEMPER.COM guys who also built the Link Research Tools. Christoph C. Cemper, the creator, just recently wrote about.
Indexing timeline – Honestly right now if a competitor wants to silently tank a websites rankings in google all they need to do is drop a bunch of bad links. Without google giving us webmasters the ability to see the links we may never even know …
10 Types of Unnatural Link Building Tactics + 10 Quality Alternatives … – With all of the recent news of companies being called out for paid links, Google sending warnings about unnatural links, over optimization penalties, and b.
How to Deal With Bad Links | Search Engine People | Toronto – As most marketers and Webmasters know, Google has been very busy with some major, disruptive updates to their search algorithms in recent months. The recent Panda and Penguin updates have decimated search traffic for some sites and even destroyed entire business that were largely dependent on search traffic. Look for opportunities to remove patterns of links on a wide scale that are likely pretty low value and leave obvious footprints (such as footer links that have been purchased by you or on your behalf, link networks, etc.
Absolute Versus Relative Linking in Web Sites | Bill Hartzer – What is an absolute link? What is a relative link? Why should you care which one you use? When it comes to how you set up the links on your web site, it’s important to use an absolute link (which means that when you link to another page on your web site you specify the complete URL in the link like http://www. A relative link is when you have an internal link and you only specify the page URL and not the full URL in the link (for example, a relative link would be when you only link to page1. I’ll tell you my search engine ranking horror story and exactly why you should use absolute linking on your web site.
Google Introduces Disavow Backlinks Tool for SEO – A much-anticipated new tool aimed at combating negative links has just been released by Google. Within your Google Webmaster Tools website profile, you now have the option to disavow backlinks that you would like Google to ignore when considering your website or domain for indexing. Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts announced the Disavow Link tool recently at PubCon and has published an introduction video (embedded below) with suggestions as to why webmasters may want to use it as well as a word of warning to webmasters to use caution and proceed slowly.