Now that you’ve learned the importance of links to your Google ranking and performed an audit of your link profile, the cleanup work begins.

Google requires that website owners wanting to remove links must first conduct outreach to the link owner. I recommend conducting an email campaign to capture the contact details from the website you no longer want linking to your site. These are typically found in the “contact us” or “about us” footer link. Take their contact details and place them into a spreadsheet. If there is no contact email, make a note of it, as you need it for the final step.

Conduct an email outreach campaign where you individually contact the website owners linking to your domain. You should send at least two emails, leaving a week gap for the webmasters to respond.

Keep in mind that being courteous is good webmaster etiquette, and a friendly email will more likely be met with a positive response than a demanding one. Here is an example of an email you can use:

Hello [name or webmaster], 

Hope you’re having a great day!  

This email is about removing links to our site from your site. If this email has not reached the right person, please forward it to the appropriate contact or kindly share with us the email address.  I work for [company name] and we’re refining the links directed to our pages down to the most relevant links possible (and avoid being hit by those pesky Penguin updates).  

If it’s possible, could you please remove the following links on your site?   

[Provide your URL]

Please let us know one way or the other when you get a chance. We would really appreciate it!

Cheers, 

[Your name]

[Your title]

[Company name]

If the website owner replies and is unsure of where precisely the links are on their own website (it can happen, especially if the webmaster is new to the company or there isn’t a dedicated webmaster at all), you will need to go back to Majestic  (Majestic SEO – a link finding tool discussed in the second post of this series) and download the URLs in your report. The file is much larger, so use your fastest computer for this task. When you access this .csv file, filter in the link source by the domain in question and cut and paste those links into a separate spreadsheet to send to the webmaster to remove.

Give webmasters who respond a month to complete the work; you’ll need to check if they did remove those links later on, so make sure you save the spreadsheet you sent them as a reference file.

The best way to check if they have removed the file is to right click on the webpage that contained the link and then click on “inspect element.” Use crt-f (or command-f if on a Mac) and type in your domain. Press enter to see all instances. If the link is still there without a nofollow tag, it means the webmaster did not remove the links and you should add it to your disavow file.

Nofollow tag example: <a href="http://www.rent.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="All Homes"> Rent.com</a>

Disavow Those Bad Domains

The final step in this process is to create and upload your disavow file in the search console (which we discussed in the How to Perform a Link Audit post). So, after your outreach, create a list of all the domains that did not respond and those that did not have contact details. Put them into a spreadsheet:

• Use a free program to define the domains down to how Google sees domains, such as https://urltodomain.com.
• Concatenate these domains with “domain:”

• Make room in the first row (insert) and put in a #tag and write down the work you did along with the dates (this is a reference for yourself in the future).
• Save the file as a .txt file.
• Upload the file to your disavow file on Google Search Console. Keep in mind that each upload of a disavow file will delete your previous work, so you need to merge your list of old/new if you have one.

You’re Now Ready for Penguin!

So, there you have it. Usually within 2-8 weeks, Google will attach invisible nofollow tags to the links you put in your disavow file and they won’t be passing negative and spammy quality signals to your site anymore.

Now you can relax about links for a while and focus on filling your vacancies again, as you’ve hedged your risk of exposure to the next penguin update! However, you might want to repeat this process every quarter to ensure that you don’t get new spammy domains linking to you. 

Thanks for reading, good luck and let me know in the comments below if you have any questions.