Identify Low Quality Links

Poor back linking issues is major concern these days. If any website is not doing well then first thing come up in mind is “Does Google penalize my website?”, “Is that a poor baclinks issue which prohibit my website from ranking higher in SERP?”

For one of my client, beside great SEO & fresh content, website was not doing well. So I thought of checking backlinks.

Here is my step by step search procedure:

1. I gathered all backilnks for client’s website using tool “open site explorer”.

2. Then gathered all data in excel.

3. Sorted out websites with low DA (domain authority), any special signs like (????, Â ) in title tag or anchor text, any irrelevant anchor texts.

4. Grouped them in separate excel.

5. Checked in Google search with search term “Domain name”, if website does not come up in first few results then that website is either penalized or on the way to get penalize as per my reading. Gathered all penalized websites.

6. Forward that to my link building team to remove those penalized websites.

Try to remove these websites if easily possible & try not to use them for further submissions.

It’s always good to build quality link instead of trying to remove bad links, but we can give this small try to easily removable links.

I also checked baclinks with Netpeak. I was able to find websites having same IP address with “subnet” option from Netpeak tool. I heard that if option “Google index” from Netpeak is n/f, that means the website is deindexed from Google but somehow it was showing me n/f for twitter also L(I do not know if anything was wrong on my side).

 Anyways, considering quality is important than quantity in current scenario, here are some conclusions:

-When pick up websites from complete list first check IP address & remove the website with same IP addresses.

-Submit link to particular website one time only.

-Websites with low DA should be checked in Google with domain name only e.g. “abc” for “abc.com” and if abc.com does not come up in first few results, then avoid that website.

Quality Link Building Techniques

Since the day, Penguin update rolled out quality link building has become more crucial for SEO’s.  I would like to share few techniques which I am using recently.

1. Set up Google alerts that notify you every time someone mentions your branded keywords and check out each site that come up in alerts. Then you can send linking request to webmasters of some of those websites which are perfect for back linking purpose.

2. You can try for .edu links by asking your client’s staff to sign up for their college alumni network where they can put company’s website. One of the natural way to get edu links.

3. Update blog at least once in week and share blog post on Google+, Tweeter, and Face book

4. Creating public profile on

 Flickr·    Current   Kirtsy     PostOnFir CoRank   Digg Propeller   Technorati    BloggingZoom   MyBlogLog

These websites do not have No-followed links in their public profiles

5. Link building with competitor analysis. Consider competitors with position 10, 11, 12 as these websites work hard to get on page one, so we can get good source for links. Use of commands like intext:domain-to-check(.)com for competitor back link analysis.

6. Try using different anchor texts for linking purpose. For example if the key term is “ABC”, then use “ABC”,”ABC blog”, “Contact ABC “,”ABC services” etc.    

7. You can look for theme based guest post opportunities. For example, searched for author “XYZ” who writes on particular issue, then run query ["XYZ” Guest] in Google search. You will get many sites which allow guest post & even you look for your niche.