Since the dramatic Google Penguin update a few weeks ago webmasters and companies have been going crazy trying to clean up their backlink profiles. Instead of doing things to improve their web pages, some webmasters concentrate on removing backlinks that point to their site.
If you’re a regular reader of our newsletter, you know that we don’t recommend deleting backlinks. It won’t help your website and chances are that you will waste a lot of time and money:
- Is Google’s disavow links tool just a trick?
- Google statement: the disavow tool does not hurt other websites
Another problem of link removal requests: they can be used to hurt competitors.
How black hat optimizers can fake link removal requests
Let’s say that you own the domain www.MyGreatCompany.com and you have great links from great websites. Your competitor could do the following to delete the high quality links that point to your site:
- Register a domain name such as www.MyGreatCompanyMail.com or another domain that is very similar to your address.
- Redirect the new domain to your real domain name so that people who enter the fake domain name in their web browser think that it’s an official domain.
- Create an email address from that domain and send emails to all websites that link to your website with a request to remove the link.
How to protect your website against these people
If you don’t monitor the backlinks that point to your website, it might be weeks before you realize that the links were taken down.
If you use the link manager in IBP, you will be notified if a website removes the link to your site. If you want to be on the safe side, use the link manager in IBP to make sure that all of your backlinks are intact.
How to improve the Google rankings of your website
Don’t worry about deleting bad backlinks and don’t even think about hurting other domains. Concentrate on improving your own website.
The tools in IBP help you to improve your web pages so that they get the best possible rankings on Google and other search engines. Concentrate on your own website. There’s no better way to invest your time.
Article by Axandra SEO software
