Welcome to my first Local SEO column of the year on Search Engine Land! While most other sites are publishing roundups or predictions for 2017, there’s really only one way to kick off the beginning of a new year: a new installment of Greg’s Soapbox!
As you faithful readers know, my posts are almost always influenced by recent conversations with clients or near-clients, and this one’s no different. A few weeks ago, one of the auto dealers on our website platform called our support department with a question about inbound links. Our support team forwarded the call over to our SEO team.
The dealer wanted to know how to “get rid of some links.” Obviously, we asked for a bit more detail — and were blown away by the answer.
The dealer explained that they had about 75 to 80 links that they wanted to get rid of because they were bad links. He had run his link profile through Moz and had seen some high Spam Scores, so they turned to Majestic and saw low Trust Flow. He only had 100 inbound links, and he wanted to summarily execute 80 percent of his link profile.
The problem was, only one of the links was really a bad link. The other links were actually very valuable links — because they were links from small, hyper-local websites. The dealer was taking the tools at face value without really understanding how to use them.
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