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In the Google Webmaster Tools account of my latest project I can see 57 Internal Links (links to internal pages), that are not actually from our site. Since we just launched it, there are no real internal links, only these "fake" ones.

My only guess is that at some point in the past, someone used that domain name, and now these links live somewhere in the internet and currently lead to 404 page in our site.

So my question is, how to tell Google that these links are not actually part of our site and they have never been ?

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  • "now these links live somewhere in the internet" - If these are listed under "internal links" then they previously existed on your domain. If they are "somewhere in the internet" then they would be listed under "external links". – MrWhite Feb 14 '14 at 10:15
  • Links to these old internal pages exist somewhere, because I can see traffic coming to these URL's in my cms platform. – Snade Feb 14 '14 at 21:16
  • Ah, I think I've misinterpreted your question... you are referring to external links to the old site as reported in the external links report in GWT? As opposed to "internal links from old site"?? – MrWhite Feb 14 '14 at 22:39
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Google is a registrar so they know when a domain changes hands and probably can tell which links are for the old site and which are for the new site. But, assuming they do not, you can disavow these links in your GWT account.

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  • Disavowing (what were once) internal links does seem to go against the grain? Normal procedure to remove an internal link is to simply... remove it. So that it no longer exists. And since this is an entirely new site (on an old domain) then it already no longer exists? – MrWhite Feb 14 '14 at 10:18
  • Yes, these pages doesnt exist for quite some time now (at least 4 month, when I bought the domain) Should I do something about them, or just wait google to realize that they are not from the same site ? Is it possible for google to be mistaking my absolutely new site as a "new version" of the site that was once on this domain, and if yes, what can I do about it? – Snade Feb 14 '14 at 21:20
  • Four months is a long time. I'm surprised Google hasn't written those pages off already. You might want to manually remove them from Google's index just to get rid of this error message once and for all. – John Conde♦ Feb 14 '14 at 21:24
  • Errm, I think I've (misinterpreted) taken the question text too literally ... these are external links to internal pages? In which case disavow away (or simply ignore if the inbound links are not spam-like). As long that these external (inbound) links exist to your site then GWT will continue to report them (as 404s). – MrWhite Feb 14 '14 at 22:50
  • Thank you John Conde, I will go for manually removing them from google's index. Hopefully that will be enough. Is it possible this to be harming my potential ranking in google? The site is new and I'm hoping that someday it will have a decent ranking. I believe I've made my on-page seo almost perfect, following latest instructions(as in seo everything changes quickly) for markup, best practices and etc. – Snade Feb 15 '14 at 17:47

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