Will this technique of removing a page that has toxic links pointing to it solve a problem that would otherwise lead to a penalty ? In a nutshell, if you’re keen on getting rid of those unnatural links, you might as well remove the linked page. As a result, it will return a 404 HTTP response code.

How to Spot the Pages With the Most Unnatural Links?

When you run an unnatural link detection report, in cognitiveSEO, you have the very cool Visual Link Explorer visualization that will plot all the detected unnatural links based on the pages of the site.

Each cluster represents a page on the site and the red and yellow dots represent the distribution of the unnatural and suspect links.

So it is as simple as looking at the chart and spotting the pages that have the most unnatural links.

When Should You Apply This Unnatural Link Removal Strategy?

While this tactic can be used for any page on your website at any time, you won’t be able to do so with the homepage. You need to take this fact into consideration. The pages from your site that have a great deal of toxic links can be removed and declared 404 in order to quickly recover from a Google penalty. You’ll also have to think at all the natural links and at the content that you’re going to get rid off. So you’ll need to figure out if you want to keep the page and try to handpick and remove every unnatural link from the page or just solve the problem right from the start.

You should also know, that in order for this strategy to work, you need to delete the page that has the toxic links and that might have triggered the Unnatural Links Penalty. You won’t be able to dodge that bullet in any kind of way. The following will not solve your problem:

• Generating a robots. txt file that blocks that page from being indexed. This method won’t solve your problem as Google will simply not crawl the page but it will still be taken into consideration for your site.
• Using redirect to another page. You will still have those unnatural links pointing to your site.
• Using the same content on a newly created and canonicalized page – After GoogleBot crawls your site it will find the duplicate content. The toxic links that were assigned to the deleted page will now be assigned to the canonicalized page.
• Tagging the page as nofollow or noindex. The same as the case with robots.txt. Rendering a page with nofollow won’t make it’s links obsolete.

Does Google Recommend to 404 the Target Page in case of an Unnatural Links Penalty?

This also hides another question that comes into mind “Do 404 pages hurt my site’s ranking ?”. You shouldn’t be scared if one day you stumble upon a couple of these errors reported in Webmaster Tools. Google is aware that the Internet is very volatile and changes happen on a daily basis. Everyone deals with broken pages that return 404 as a status code. It’s also the decent way to deal with a page that was removed from the site. You should be aware that Google’s crawlers can’t see the updated 404 HTTP response code if you block it with robots.txt. But overall, the fact that you have a page that shows a 404 message doesn’t affect other pages from your site and their links.

It’s something that many people pondered upon and finally John Muller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google responded during a Webmaster Central Hangout. He was asked:

“Does removing a page that has unnatural links pointing to it accomplish the same thing when it comes to removing a link when it comes to the Penguin algorithm? If a site has all of its links pointing to one page and removes the page is the issue solved?”

He  responded “Yes, essentially that’s pretty much the same thing”. All the links that are pointing to a 404 page are dropped because there’s nothing to be linked anymore. But there might still be some differences between removing the links and removing the page that has those links. Some of them may be picked up faster by Google than the other, but he didn’t mentioned something specific.

How Should I do it?

To make sure this strategy serves it’s purpose you have to be careful on how you approach this. Only if you create the 404 page and then remove the page that has links pointing to it, you’re going to make Google disregard those links from your profile. Google’s John Muller also stated that you should make absolutely sure that accessing the URL should give you a 404 (Not Found) or a 410 ( Gone ) HTTP response code. Google reads into those messages and ignores the links.

The main flaw of this strategy is that you can’t use it when all those unnatural links are pointing to your homepage. You clearly can’t delete this general page of your site. In this situation you’re only option is to change the address of your site, but only if you’re sure those unnatural links are causing your site to lose ranking. You also need to make sure you have an informative 404 page ready to replace the deleted one.

Should I Disavow the Unnatural Links pointing to a 404 page?

Taking in consideration every advantage and disadvantage of using both these methods of dissolving unnatural links, there are some similarities and differences worth taking into consideration They share the same fate as an ultimate resort and both are irreversible processes. And, last but not least, 404ing the page has the same results as using the disavow tool. But given all the drama and uncertainty that surrounds the disavow tool, removing the linked page and replacing it with one that offers a 404 HTTP code becomes a pretty viable option.

What is the Difference Between HTTP Status Code 404 and 410?

Google reacts differently depending on the different response codes you assign to your pages. While there may be cut from the same fabric, Google’s Matt Cutts decided to explain the difference between these two shades of “page not found”.

• 200 means everything went totally fine
• 404 means page not found
• 410 typically means gone, as in the page is not found and we do not expect it to come back

He explained that 410 is basically more than a 404, it just means that the page is gone forever. He further says that you shouldn’t worry for the most part – if a page is temporarily removed you should 404 it. If the page was deleted and there are no plans of getting it back, then you should serve a 410! Regardless of the 404 or 410 HTTP response code, GoogleBot will still come back and recrawl the site to see if those pages are really gone from your site. More details in the video below.

Conclusion

Most certainly, you can remove the unnatural links by removing the linked page from your site and then 404ing it. It’s an approved method that works just as well as using the Disavow Tool. As a result, Google will proceed to de-index and remove those pages and disavow their links. But again, you need to remember one golden rule of applying this strategy – the page you want to 404 shouldn’t be an important page from your website like the homepage. For those situations you need to do a Google Disavow.

What are your thoughts on using a 404/410 HTTP response code to remove pages that have lots of unnatural links ? Have you used this strategy or are you planning to use it in the future ?

The post Unnatural Links Penalty? 404 The Bad Pages and Recover! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. The New Anchor Text Distribution & Classifier

The Anchor Text Distribution and Classifier is the place where you can define your brand and commercial keywords in order to see the overall distribution of your anchor text cloud. This is a great feature because it helps you to have a clear overall image of the anchor text profile. Yet, for this classification to be as accurate as possible it is very important to identify the commercial and the brand keywords. For a quick reminder, the brand keywords are the name of your brand or the name of your website and the commercial keywords are the keywords that have a commercial intent and may be used by a person when searching in Google. A very simple definition would say that the Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking.

Understanding how to effectively classify the brand and commercial anchor text is crucial in order to have an excellent unnatural link detection classification.

The cognitiveSEO’s new Anchor Text Classifier allows you to:

1. Filter The Anchor Text

To make your job easier, we’ve created the Quickly Search Anchors search box. You can type here a specific keyword and the widget will only show you the anchor texts containing that keyword.
By default, the anchor texts for your entire link profile will be listed. But if you want to see the anchor text for live links only, you now have the show only live links option.
We’ve created some ordering options that will be useful if you want to take some snapshots to include in a presentation or to visualize the keywords that really interest you. For example you can randomize your anchor texts in order to make an image about your overall anchor text profile, or you can have your keywords ordered by their strength or by brand.

2. Bulk Classify Anchors

This feature allows you to to quickly classify multiple anchor text keywords in bulk. In order to do that, you first need to search for the relevant keyword and, then choose what type of classification you want (brand, commercial or misc) and hit the apply button. All those anchors will be classified in bulk instantly.

3. Classify Quicker by Showing Only Unclassified Anchors

Show Only Misc Anchors helps you to finish your classification process quicker by showing only the Unclassified or Misc Anchors. By checking this option you can see what keywords are neither in the brand or commercial category and might need to be further classified. When Show Only Misc Anchors is on, all your actions will be applied only on the miscellaneous keywords.

4.Individual Anchors Classification

You can choose to classify each keyword individually. All you have to do is hover over the wanted keyword (pass your pointer over the wanted keyword) and a menu with “classify as: brand, commercial or misc” will appear. Thick the classification you wish for and your job with that anchor is done.

If you don’t want to work with the Anchor Text Classifier or you’ve finished classifying all the anchor texts and you don’t want to make further changes, you can choose the Disable Classifier option. You can hit this button at any moment of your analysis. The process is reversible (meaning you can go back to classifying anchor texts any time you want).

2. New Unnatural Link Detection Features for Power Users Mostly

In the Unnatural Link Navigator ( the fastest & most accurate Unnatural Link Detection tool ) we’ve made some updates in order to help users who are working with thousands of links to save time and be more efficient.

1. Save a Bookmark for Easier Work Return on Big Projects

When you are working on big projects and you are dealing with thousand of links, it is very likely that you are going to divide your work amount throughout several days. Every time you launch the navigator it is highly important to know what your work status is and continue from the point you left it. To do that, we offer you the possibility to save a bookmark. Hit the Save button every time you want to exit the navigator and press the Load button every time you want to start working again from where you last finished. Extremely simple and extremely useful.

2.Know What Links You Already Saw in the Navigator and Filter by it

Every time you’ll visit a link, its color will change so you can easily identify which links you have already visited. Even more, you have the possibility to see and work only with the links you have already visited or only with the links you haven’t visited yet. All you have to do is go to Filters – Link navigator – choose visited or not visited.

At cognitiveSEO we try our best to meet the needs of our customers and continually improve our features. We don’t want our clients to have only the best results but also an excellent experience while using our tool. We invite you to check our new great updates and if you haven’t tried our tool yet, take advantage of the free trial and convince yourself by the benefits that cognitiveSEO can bring to your business.

To be able to test the system, we give free 14 day trials so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post New Anchor Text Classifier & Unnatural Link Navigator Power User Features appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The short answer is that there is no exact answer on this.

There are 2 major, contradictory, opinions on this:

1. No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]
2. Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

1. Why shouldn’t I disavow No-follow links?

First of all there is an official Google representative that confirmed this. His name is John Muller and he is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland.

Here is what John has to say about it:

 “No-follow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

 Important Note: If you use the unnatural link detection in cognitive, in order to filter out the No-follow links you should just apply the No-Follow filter and work only on the Do-Follow links segment.

2. Why should I consider disavowing No-follow links?

Nothing confirmed here … only some rants …

1. No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases and there are also, some studies that prove that.

2.Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things. Negative SEO has been working for years, but the Google Guidelines denied it vehemently. Google changed their wording, a while ago, in order to reflect the possibility of someone else ability to affect your rankings.

3. What about “link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition.

I bet you are confused now. The question still remains:

Should I disavow No-follow Links? 

The safe’s bet, would be  to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links. If a domain is sending both do-follow and no-follow unnatural links, just ask for a full domain disavow there.

People have reported successful recovery stories on both the cases so I think you aren’t risking anything.

What’s your opinion on this “confusing” subject?

The post Should I Disavow No-follow Links? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.