Link Profile clean-up

In conjunction with our link audits, we do assist with link clean-up efforts. Since link clean-up is so time consuming and expensive, we generally recommend that clients handle much of it themselves so our usual involvement takes place once the client has done his or her part, and we attempt to get those last bad links taken down. Webmasters can be highly uncooperative and unresponsive so we step in to help get through to them. Much of our clean-up service simply involves providing clients with a prioritized list of links to clean up or disavow, and rates are custom quoted depending upon the severity of the problem. Some sites have 300 linking domains and 250 of those are bad. Some sites have millions of linking domains so going through that amount of data does increase the audit cost as we can end up spending triple the amount of time going through those links.

Much of our clean-up service simply involves providing clients with a prioritized list of links to clean up or disavow, and rates are custom quoted depending upon the severity of the problem

Ideally you would clean up your bad links. However, that’s not an easy process. Many webmasters will ignore removal requests or charge you for the removal. If you are removing links that you intentionally built, most webmasters will point that out and ask for money. It usually takes repeated requests to get one link taken down. Many clients do try and clean up but after seeing what happens in terms of their expenses and the lack of links actually coming down, they opt for disavowing the links. We do help with creating a disavow file but we do not submit those to Google as that is something we always ask the client to handle. In many cases, it takes a lot of time and hard work before penalties are lifted so if you are in the position of having a penalty and needing to clean-up, you should expect to have a few months or longer to wait before things get back to normal.

We do help with creating a disavow file but we do not submit those to Google as that is something we always ask the client to handle

In some cases, cleaning up the bad links results in a site with almost no links. Even after successfully cleaning up and/or disavowing, the sites don’t perform well because the link profile has been almost completely removed. We have worked with clients who have disavowed most of their links and want to start over but only after we’ve had yet another discussion about risk. In other cases we’ve continued building links for clients who are in the midst of cleaning up their profiles. It all depends upon the desires of the client and our assessment of the risks involved.

As mentioned above, a link audit starts at $1500 and that is to identify the potentially problematic links. We can also help with wording of emails that you will send to clients in order to hopefully have your links removed, but if you are unable to do this yourself (we usually suggest hiring an intern just for this purpose), we can provide you with a quote to have us do it. Our availability for this type of work is dependent upon what we have going on with our contracted link clients usually.