{"id":40062,"date":"2014-02-14T20:13:10","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T14:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/?p=40062"},"modified":"2020-05-24T11:05:17","modified_gmt":"2020-05-24T05:35:17","slug":"better-than-removing-million-backlinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2014\/02\/better-than-removing-million-backlinks\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Better Than Removing 1.7 Million Backlinks!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You probably remember we\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2013\/09\/removed-million-backlinks\/\">removed 1.7 million backlinks<\/a>\u00a0by deleting\u00a0our WordPress theme pages to fight off Google Panda\/Penguin penalties and unnatural link warnings, The traffic sustained despite removing 1.7 million backlinks to the pages over the last few months. \u00a0The idea was that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2013\/06\/delete-urls-with-bad-backlinks-to-remove-google-penalty\/\">deleting urls with bad links<\/a> would make 404 pages which will make the backlinks useless. Yet the \u00a092% traffic drop still persisted.<\/p>\n<h2>Is Losing Backlinks A Good Idea<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-40078\" style=\"line-height: 1.5;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/thinking-girl.jpg\" alt=\"thinking new redirects\" width=\"355\" height=\"338\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/thinking-girl.jpg 355w, https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/thinking-girl-150x142.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/thinking-girl-300x285.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px\" \/><br \/>\nSo I curbed my theme designing activities for the last year as it \u00a0no longer seemed possible to get credit for my theme designs with footer links. But then I observed that most popular theme design companies like Studiopress (<a title=\"Genesis WordPress Theme Framework [Review]\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2012\/09\/genesis-wordpress-theme-framework-review\/\">Genesis Theme<\/a>), DIYThemes (<a title=\"Thesis WordPress Theme [Review]\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2010\/04\/thesis-wordpress-theme-review\/\">Thesis theme<\/a>) and many other theme design services did maintain a dofollow footer credit link and performed well in search.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, how would Google analyze a site where 1.7 million entries to the site return 404 errrors? Also it seemed silly to loose all the link juice by 404 pages.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" style=\"border: 1px solid black;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/theme-404-urls.png\" alt=\"Deleted urls\" width=\"405\" height=\"234\" \/><\/p>\n<p>After all we did \u00a0not force people to use our WordPress themes, it was listed in the official WordPress theme directory like millions of other themes and were free to use under GPL licence. \u00a0There had to be a better way&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Fixing Google Penalty<\/h3>\n<p>Here is some\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/webmasters.googleblog.com\/2011\/05\/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">official Google advice<\/a> which everyone must seriously consider, and it suggests a way to deal with such content issues. They say that low-quality content in any part of the site can impact ranking of the whole site &#8211; \u00a0so possibly you should remove these low quality pages, or improve content quality. The other way is to mov these low \u00a0quality pages to a new domain name and this might help improve search engine rankings of your good content.<\/p>\n<h3>New WordPress Theme Site<\/h3>\n<p>So I created a new site to host all out WordPress themes at the new domain name QuickOnlineThemes.com. I removed the 404 errors to the 3 theme pages and redirected all the links to the new theme pages using htaccess rules. This not only removed millions of 404 errors received by search engine crawlers, but also facilitated them to find the new site.<\/p>\n<p>I added the site to Google webmaster tools and it started showing in search results (in a day!) and now shows that at over 700,000 backlinks have already migrated to the new site in 2 weeks.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-40076\" style=\"border: 1px solid black;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/new-backlinks.png\" alt=\"new backlinks\" width=\"272\" height=\"153\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/new-backlinks.png 272w, https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/new-backlinks-150x84.png 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 272px) 100vw, 272px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">I also updated the WordPress themes and had a chance to start redesigning again and do expect to create many more new themes as this site is targeted to WordPress themes and design. Maybe I will develop a themes FAQ and other cool tips around the new site. \u00a0Keep watching the site.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">Better than removing 1.7 million backlinks &#8211; What do you think?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You probably remember we\u00a0removed 1.7 million backlinks\u00a0by deleting\u00a0our WordPress theme pages to fight off Google Panda\/Penguin penalties and unnatural link&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":40078,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogging","category-search-engine-optimization","category-about"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}