DEEP DIVE

Toxic link profiles: Why your money pages are stuck

Before I dive into the test, it's worth providing some context.

I recently ran an analysis of one of my affiliate sites and discovered 95% of revenue was coming from just 3–4 pages.

Like any sane business owner, I doubled down. These pages became our top priority. If they dropped even 1–2 positions, our revenue took a massive hit. We obsessively monitored, updated, and protected these money-makers.

This uneven revenue distribution isn’t unique to me. The Pareto Principle shows up everywhere in life—80% of your outcomes come from 20% of your efforts. In my case, 95% of revenue was generated from just 5% of our pages.

Whenever these golden pages dropped in rankings, my solution was predictable: update content or (more often) build more links.

Then our most valuable page tanked. 

And not just temporarily. For six brutal months, I tried everything to resurrect it. What made it even more frustrating was that this was clearly a page-specific issue.

When the March 2025 Core Update rolled out, the rest of the site doubled in traffic. But this cash-cow page? Still stuck in the 16th position for its primary keyword.

Desperate, I had an audit done. The verdict was clear: my backlink profile was the culprit.

I had built 23 links to this page, and every single one had either an exact match or near-match anchor text. If the keyword was "best protein powder," then every anchor was either identical or a slight variation of that phrase.

Google HATES this! I went way too hard.

The "solutions" everyone recommends

When SEOs face a page that won't rank, they typically try one of these approaches:

1. Keep updating the content

"Maybe if I add more words . . . or fewer words . . . or more headers . . . or better internal linking . . ."

I've updated this page 10+ times without seeing any improvement in rankings. At some point, it's time to admit the content itself isn't the problem.

2. Build more links

This is the classic "if it's not working, do more of it" approach. But if your page is being penalized because of crappy links with exact-match anchors, adding more links (even quality ones) is like trying to dilute poison.

Sure, it's less concentrated, but it's still poison.

3. Submit a disavow file

The traditional approach is to identify those spammy links, create a disavow file, and submit it to Google. Then pray Google will forgive your sins.

But I have legitimately never seen this work. I was just chatting with my friend Shane Dutka, the owner of SEO Shield, and he confirmed he's never seen it work either.

Instead of begging Google for forgiveness, I decided to test a completely different approach with my stubborn page. Here's exactly what I'm doing right now:

Step 1: Accept that Google hates my page

First, I had to accept reality. After trying everything else with no results, I finally admitted that Google had put my URL on some kind of blacklist.

It wasn't personal (well, it kind of was), but Google had decided my URL didn't deserve to rank, and I’m almost certain it's because of those exact-match anchor-text links.

Step 2: Implement a 410 Gone response code

A 404 says "page not found." A 410 says "this page is GONE, never coming back, forget it ever existed."

It's the SEO equivalent of putting my content in a witness protection program.

By serving a 410, I'm sending a clear signal to Google: "That page you hated? Yeah, it's dead. You can remove it from your index now. Please love me again."

I’m also not using a 301 redirect because that would keep those toxic links in my profile. I want them completely gone and killed off.

Step 3: Create a fresh URL with the same content

Next, I created a new URL for my content. 

For example, my original page was: /best-protein-powder

My new page is: /best-protein-powders

I copied my content over, made some improvements, but kept everything else the same.

Step 4: Fix all internal links to point to the new URL

Once the new page was live, I updated all my internal links to point to the new URL rather than the old one.

What's more, I've specifically added links to this new URL in these three places:

• menu nav

• footer

• homepage

I've found that menu nav and footer links help the page get indexed faster, while a homepage link helps boost its rankings (since my homepage is the strongest page on my site).

Step 5: Submit the new URL for indexing

As soon as I published the content on the new URL, I submitted it for indexing.

Remember, this is a money-making page for me and I need it indexed and ranking ASAP.

Step 6: Build a few strategic links

After publishing this page, I've started building a few links to it. But I'm being extremely careful not to repeat my past mistakes.

I am NOT going hard on exact-match anchor texts this time. I'm just building a few diverse links to see if the page starts to get traction.

Step 7: Monitor performance like a hawk

I've set up a weekly task to check the rankings of this page. I'm making sure it stays indexed, adding additional internal links, and tracking performance over time.

Early results of my experiment

It's still early days, but I’m happy to see my new page got indexed within four hours.

If you’re interested to see how this experiment plays out over the next few months, click the link below.

I’ll shoot you an email once I see how this plays out.

Remember, SEO isn't always about playing nice with Google's guidelines. Sometimes it's about working around them in creative ways. This strategy gives your content a second chance without the baggage of past mistakes.

Let me know if you implement this and what results you see. Unlike "SEO gurus" who disappear after giving advice, I actually want to know if this works for you too.