Cleaning bad links on aged domains

[Rado_Ch]

Hey guys,

I got a quick one for you here, hope you can help. Got a friend that decided to enter the domain business and more namely reg-ging expired/dropped domains because of their age. Now, as any newbie, his first steps were rushed and he regged a keyworded domain he though he had a good market for. Now, this domain has over 15k links and upon a quick review I've found that a large portion of those were irrelevant links from many different niches. Now, not sure what advice I can give him for their removal tho. Is the Disavow Tool the best for the job? Or you use other easier tools with similar functionality? In any ways, I don't think contacting the site owners individually asking them to remove the links would be a viable option as there is just too many of them and some come from non-existing/abandoned sites. What would your advice be?

Thanks in advance

 

[enlytend]

Disavow should do the trick. Get links from every source you can (WMT, Majestic, Ahrefs, OSE) put in Excel, sort and remove dupes. Put anything dodgy in the disavow file. Disavow at the domain level or you're likely to miss something.

Fortunately, when you have that many links often you'll have a lot from the same domains, but that can still leave a lot of work! You may be able to do some automated filtering to pick out the 'most likely suspects'. Like feed domains through scrapebox and sort by pagerank or domain authority.*

WMT will tell if the domain is carrying a manual penalty. If it doesn't have one, you don't need to remove links or file a recon request, just disavow. Disavow is processed automatically and should drop things out as the links in it are crawled. It's usually pretty fast - month or so.

Expired domains often have that problem. Sometimes it was a site gone wrong from the beginning, other times "clean" domains are picked up, used for spam then dropped or resold. You should check backlinks before you buy - not just the number of them, but go look at what they are.

Or the other option is to resell "as is"...

Oh and just thought of something else: If you sell, the disavow file should go with the domain. If it's removed bad links that still exist will come back. Disavowing doesn't get rid of them just "neutralizes" them.

* Low PR or DA doesn't mean the link's bad - it could be a new site or a small site which never got the attention it deserved. You have to look, or you'll be throwing out good links with the bad, but you'll find MORE spammy links in this group.

 

[Rado_Ch]

Many thanks @enlytend, flawless help as always