Carlos Hank Rhon : Can Link Removals Hurt Rankings?

Let’s say you have a site that an editor adds at Wikipedia. A few weeks later, another editor decides to remove that link - the search engines spider and discover the addition and, later, the removal. Will the temporal loss of a high quality link affect you more adversely than if the link had never been placed at all? Is removal from Wikipedia (or other high authority sites) a factor in hurting rankings more than simply taking that link’s juice out of your site/page’s strength? (note - Wikipedia might not be a great example, since links are often added and later removed) :confused:

Hi Carlo,

Good question .. For page rank/link juice/ (what ever else we want to call it), to pass and effect a websites ranking within the SERPS can take sometime e.g. if you had a link on a site for 2 weeks then took it down I would be very surprised if this had any effect (good or bad) to the search engine results.

Links need to be present within a website for sometime before you see any effect within your search engine results.

Elements that effect this would be, the engine crawl rates, updating the algorithm etc.

FYI: Last time I checked wiki were using the NOFOLLOW tag, thus not passing page rank :(

Hope this is of some help

Good answer above...

I agree, a few years ago Google made a MAJOR change to their algo and things just took much longer to have an effect on SERP... So the above is correct. Don't expect overnight results. This was put in place to combat heavy spamming. Professional search engine optimization folks know that your results are now in the 90-180 day range.. They can be quicker if you already have a powerful site. If you are just starting out, it can take longer.

Also - I also though Wiki went nofollow. But not positive.

Yes, If you're removing quality backlinks, it may hurt website rankings. http://jnlmoving.com/about-us/