GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 29 - July 2014

Shouldyou trust software tools that state the linksare toxic? There are somanydifferent perceptions ofwhat “toxic” links are. It depends onyour classifications.Are thesede-indexed sites? Hacked sites? Blatantly andobvious paid links fromhighpage rank sites?Massive site-wide links? Scraped contextual links? Malware links? Some off-the-shelf software is good, but its reliability is only as good as thedata that’s fed inmanually. I specificallyuse “toxic” to refer to siteswith a bad reputationor that have hostedmal- ware in the last 90days. Uponmanual review, I tend touse the WOT toolbar tooffer insight into a site’s reputation. If doingbulk checks youmaywish to checkout LRTor ScrapeBox’s plug-in to detectmalware. How canyouavoid reputational damage toa brandwhenundertaking link removal? Youwon’t be thefirst tohave fallen into apenalty –norwill you be the last.My advice is to identifyyour official partners/ambas- sadors/business associates andput these into aVIP list that should not be contacted.Don’t spam; treat allwebmasterswith respect. Try tomaintain andbuild relationships as youundertake thepro- cess. Younever know, that sports bloggerwith a site-wideyouhave asked tobe removedmight pushyour great content tohis 32,000 Twitter followers oneday. Whenshouldyouuploadadisavowfile? Somewould argue that the timing reallydepends on the typeofmessageyouget inGoogle WebmastersTools, i.e., the typeof penaltyyou have received. I believe thebest time toupload the disavowfile iswhenyou’re ready togo toGoogle with armsup and say, “Hey, look,we’vedone it! We’ve cleanedup thedomain.Here’s the statistical evidence, here are themitigating circumstances – andhere is thedisavowfile.” Googleoften turnsdown reconsideration requestsand providesexamplesof poor-quality links that justify itsdecision. It canbeavery confusing time if you can’t identify these links usingyour existing tools. 16 Google penalties: Some key questions tohelp youon the path to recovery