Quick question regarding low quality links to a specific page

[NickP]

Hello,

My brother employed a shady seo company a few years ago to build backlinks to his site. A lot of these backlinks point to an individual page. I have tried to remove as many of these links as possible but there are still 300+.

Unfortunately, i can't actually remove this page and 410 it as there is a flash interface which links from this page and when you click the back button it loads up this page and i don't have the source file for the flash to update the link.

I have added noindex,nofollow meta tag to this page and added rel=nofollow to all links on the page.

Is this enough?

Or will this page with low quality links continue to harm the overall domain link profile whilst its still online?

I ask because i heard if you 410 a page which contains bad backlinks there won't be any negative link juice passed to the main domain as the page doesn't exist.

Thanks.

Nick

[Robert Charlton]

Hi Nick. My gut reaction is that yes, that's extremely shady and has effects that goes beyond just the backlinks.

Apart from the bad backlinks pointing to the page, the disabling of the back button that forces reloading of the page would probably cause Google to penalize the site.

The disabled back button would probably also cause visitors to bail from the site. Visitors now are probably closing the tab if they can't navigate away from the page.

Unfortunately, i can't actually remove this page and 410 it as there is a flash interface which links from this page and when you click the back button it loads up this page and i don't have the source file for the flash to update the link.

Find it. Hire a programmer to take care of this. Imagine that you were a site visitor and couldn't use the back button. How would you feel about it? If I were Google, I'd ban the site and throw away the key.

You are correct that you need to remove the page.

[NickP]

Hmm i think you completely misunderstood...

I haven't disabled any back button?

I said that the flash interface has a back button which loads up the page which has low quality links pointing to it meaning i can't remove this page.

Im asking it "rel=nofollow" on all the links and adding a meta tag "noindex,nofollow" is sufficient to avoid harming the domain as a whole.

Nick

[adder]

Nick,

Noindex will simply remove the page from the index. It won't magically nullify the bad links and make your site healthy. Google will still follow the bad links from the spam sites, land on your page and say "oh, I'm not supposed to index this but I can still see it."

The only way to disassociate your brother's site from the bad links, I'm afraid is to delete the page and apply a 404.

Think of it from this perspective - you get an opportunity to update the page. How difficult can it be? Hire a programmer (as Robert Charlton said) and do the page in HTML5. Flash is a thing of the past anyway.

[Robert Charlton]

Nick - Sorry if there's a misinterpretation. As I read it now, I can see where I might have misread it, but I'm still not completely clear about what you're saying, and there are several possible scenarios....

I haven't disabled any back button?

I said that the flash interface has a back button which loads up the page which has low quality links pointing to it meaning i can't remove this page.

To me, this sounded like...

a) the back button isn't performing as expected...
b) and that the target page for all the bad external backlinks coming in is reloaded by a Flash interface when "a back button" is used.

In light of your clarification, I take it that this isn't the back button... ie, it's not the main back button for the browser, but it's a separate back button built into a "Flash interface".

The extent of the interface isn't clear, but it will make a difference to your situation.

I've run into two kinds of Flash interfaces, both a disaster for SEO. One, just Flash nav links for a site essentially built in html, with various Flash embellishments. Flash links can't be crawled, but they look fancy. Each html page does have its own url. The last time I encountered a developer doing this was in 2007. It's a dated approach.

The other scenario, much worse, is that the bulk of the site is a "Flash movie", as I think they were called, with the entire "movie" (consisting of many so-called "pages") all defaulting to only one url... essentially search engine invisible except for html text within the default html page.

Since you described the setup as having "a back button which loads up the page which has low quality links pointing to it", I had read it to mean that it was always reloading a particular html page... ie, the one page with links on it. not a Flash sequence. And since it was always the page with links on it, the Flash back button sounded like a trick to keep you stuck on the targeted page. Thus, my possible misinterpretation.

More to follow on your question, but first please advise whether the links page you're describing...

i) is a single html page in an html site with Flash embellishment...
ii) or part of a Flash movie sequence (that's embedded in a single html page and addressed by a single url)...
iii) and, if (ii), whether the entire site is a Flash movie, or whether part of it a Flash movie and part is individual html pages

As adder says, you do want to get rid of the Flash, but if the entire site is a Flash movie and you 410 the default url for it, you may essentially be removing all inbound link juice to the site.