Dealing With Unhelpful Links

It took Romo WAY too long to figure out he had linked up with bad news!

What do you do when realize that you have piles of with links you’d rather not have on your site? The easy answer is to remove them, but what if they are the kind you can’t really get rid of? You know exactly what I’m talking about. You got your site set up, hit all your family and friends up for links, and now those non-relevant, off topic, zero PageRank links from blogs and little personal sites are dragging you down quicker than a football that has Jessica Simpson dating their quarterback. It really can be that bad.

We’ve comprehensively gone over what sites to link to in the pas – what backlinks are worth the most,  and how to avoid links that are likely to hurt you. What if you jumped into link building the wrong from the start?  Think back to when you first set up your site, and what links from those days are sitting there like an elephant in the room?

There is some good news about all this! You don’t have to hurt feelings or make enemies by getting rid of those links in case that is what you are most worried about. Instead of deleting them,  direct search engine spiders to discount links, pages and even whole directories if need be. That is an option far to many people exercise. Don’t waste time and energy fixing the problems by doing pre-emptve damage control to lessen the blow of removing a link. ‘Disallow’, ‘no-index’ and ‘no-follow’ are useful tools to keep ‘bad links’ or junk pages from hurting you so much.  These are temporary fixes, but they do work.

Add a ‘no-follow’ attribute to ‘bad’ links and ‘disallow’ spiders to access those awful pages. You can add a no-follow to a link simply by adding it to the HTML like this:
<a href=”http://www.link-not-good.com/”rel=”nofollow“>don‘t look! </a>.

You can put a page disallow in your root folder added to the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /bad-page/keep/out.html

Take the time to link very specifically to each page for the highest relevance. Categorize links carefully and match them to the best pages in your site. Bt doing this, it will help strengthen your website from within. Don’t bypass this free opportunity! It is essential that you have a strong internal site architecture to be competitive. There is no plainer way to say that.

As for those reciprocal links from family and friends, consider a ‘Friends of (your sitename)’ page,  and have the less relevant links listed there. It’s not the same thing as before, but will anyone really notice? In some cases they may even think that is a cooler place to have a link. You can no-follow each link, or disallow the whole page. This lends a little extra ‘testimonial’ style to your site for visitors as well; it’s like seeing your ‘followers’. It’s not a necessity, but it is a great tip!