Backlink from closed websites

[Treud]

Hi,

I still receive backlink in the search console (both Bing and Google), from website that are no longer open. It's been 6 months for one (maybe more).
Do you know when it will refresh or what I need to do to really get ride of this links?

Thanks !

[KnowOneSpecial]

Those links are in the index of those search engines. Understand that those links will be there until they are removed from the index. There is really nothing you can do to remove pages in the index that have links pointing to you and you don't control.

The good news the links don't exist and therefore will not harm your rankings. My advice is don't worry about non-existent backlinks.

[Treud]

ok ! thanks :)

[jediviper]

What does it mean that these websites are no longer open? That the domain has been expired? Or that there is no content available anymore?

What happens if a domain is bought by someone and without any content, he just redirects through the .htaccess to another site?
Then this link will remain constantly active, right?
And I also think that any link juice left available, will also be transferred through this redirection.

[Treud]

One of the domain is expired.
The other one is still mine, but it's empty (Just have the URL, no more content).

[tangor]

SEs never forget. I still get occasional hits from expired, dead, etc from 1999-2012. Apparently just testing waters to see of the site revived, or merely makedo work for their program(s).

URLS never go away.

If the hits bother, turn them into 403s in htaccess and go from there.

[lucy24]

For an analogy, think of when G says that a given page is in your sitemap. It doesn't necessarily mean that the page is in your current sitemap, or even one from the year before last. It just means that once upon a time they found the page in your sitemap, and now they will forever have it tagged as “you heard it here first”.

[tangor]

Probably one of the few who do NOT have sitemaps. So that experience is not one I have encountered. :)

[Treud]

thanks for the hints!

Yes I starts to realize that Google never forget ! And even URLs that are away from even our website, are still waiting to be crawled again ! There should be a ton of URL in the Google database that is totally outdated !