Are you wondering if you should consider link pruning to help you with your website’s SEO?
Many say that link pruning could help you reduce some bad effects of Google Penguin updates that may have cost you some traffic and rankings. Read on for some tips and information to help you learn more about why some webmasters and SEO specialists are doing link pruning for websites.
Search engines typically look at the sorts of links your site(s) are related to when measuring your site. Links to you and places you link to are very telling to Google and other search engines and they help those search engines measure your relevance to your topic. Links to popular, authoritative, and relevant sites could help our website get recognised for the right niche and could help boost the profile of our site, too. But the wrong types of links could de-value our sites.
Why? If, for example, you have quite a few pornographic or spam sites pointing to a specific page, it could send search engines the wrong message about your website.
Some website owners find themselves with a high number of unsavoury sites linking to them. Why? Other sites could be trying to hitch a wagon to your site to try to capitalise on your good rankings. Or, perhaps at one point in time either you or an SEO company you were working with opted to participate in a linking scheme, believing it would be helpful. Those efforts might not be working out so well for you.
Quality and Quantity
Yes, search engines do look at the number of links pointing to your site but they also look at the quality of those links. It might be prudent to look into the sites linking to you to see whether or not you really want the attention of those websites. It’s also smart to moderate your blog’s comments, for example, and not let through obvious spam attempts that include links to low quality or taboo subject sites.
Your search engine traffic reports can tell you which sites point links to your site. If the sites are not the sorts of sites you’d like your site associated with, you can contact the site owner to request a link removal. Most will oblige. If they do not, you may want to threaten to contact their host or their advertising partners to report unsavory behavior to Google. (This will get the attention of most webmasters). It’s smart to look at your links on a monthly basis (or have your SEO company do this for you) so you can see attention and determine whether it’s positive or negative. You won’t want to request removal of every link that points to your site as links could help with SEO as well as help direct traffic your way but if you see anything that looks like it could link your site in with less-than-savoury websites, it might be worth doing something about it.