Removing perverted Links by Removing Pages on Your Website

Trying to fresh up your backlink profile? Did you know that you can rapidly remove links by removing the page of your site to which that link points?

Obviously this tactic can’t be used for links pointing to your home page. But, if you have inner pages that have built up huge numbers of unnatural links and are causing your site to be affected harmfully by a Google penalty or algorithm issue, then this could be a good method to use.

Be sure you do it correctly though! Later on in this article I’ll share about how a client of mine got their site re-penalized by making an error in 404ing their pages.

Removing a Page with Unnatural Links pointing to it

During a Webmaster Central Hangout, Google employee John Mueller was asked:
Does removing a page that has abnormal links pointing to it accomplish the same thing when it comes to removing a link when it comes to the Penguin algorithm? If a site has its entire links pointing to one page and removes the page is the issue solved?

"Yes, basically that’s pretty much the same thing," Mueller said. "So, what happens when a page is removed and the page returns a 404, what happens is that we drop those links so that they don’t count. Generally talking, if you can’t remove those links and you don’t want to use the disavow back links tool then you could remove those pages."

And here's how Mueller answered a question in the Google Webmaster Forum on the similar topic:
In general, if you remove the page that is being linked to and make sure that it returns a 404/410 HTTP response code, we'll overlook the links to those pages.

Don’t Make These Mistakes!

Please know, though, that the page must be really removed in order for the links pointing to it to no longer count. The following won't work to take away links:

•    No indexing and/or no following the page. A no indexed, no followed page will still receive Page Rank from links pointing to it. Marking a page on your site no indexed and/or no followed doesn't achieve the same thing as physically removing a link.
•    Blocking by robots.txt: A page that is infertile by robots.txt will still receive Page Rank as well. The robots.txt directive will simply tell Google not to crawl that page. But, if links point to it then they will still count towards your site.
•    Redirecting the pages to another page on your site. A forward will pass somewhere from 95 to 100 percent of the Page Rank from bad link on to the redirected page and won't remove the link.
•    Removing the link but creating an identical page on your site with a different URL. I've seen situations where Google can be familiar with identical content and automatically cannibalize it. What this means is that links pointing to the original page will be attributed to the new page.

A Grievous Error

One of my clients made a big mistake. Several months ago we worked hard to take away an unnatural links penalty that this client received.
An earlier SEO company had built abnormal links to their site by creating a large number of articles on the site and then paying other sites to link to these articles. We detached those unnatural links by removing all of the articles that had been made on the site. If someone clicked on one of those unnatural links, they would be going to to a 404 page.

The site also had some other visibly unnatural links, such as low-quality directories which we dealt with as well. We were very pleased when Google removed the unnatural links punishment from the site.
However, I was very astonished to find out about two months later that the site was penalized.
It didn’t take long to decide what had happened. The site owners had decided to redirect all of those 404 pages to the home page.

Whether it was done in error, or done to try to sneakily regain some link juice, I don't know. Somehow their site underwent another physical review and the penalty was levied again.

Should You 404 Pages or Just Disavow the perverted Links?

In the same Hangout linked to above, Mueller said that using the disavow tool to ask Google to not count these bad links would work just as well as 404ing the page(s) on your sites to remove links.

However, as there is argument over the use of the disavow tool,I would suggest that if all of a page’s links are bad ones, to just remove the page rather than disavow. Removing the page will remove all of the bad links.