How do I know what links are bad enough for the Google disavow tool?
-
I am currently working for a client who's back link profile is questionable. The issue I am having is, does Google feel the same way about them as I do?
We have no current warnings but have had one in the past for "unnatural inbound links". We removed the links that we felt were being referred to and have not received any further warnings, nor have we noticed any significant drop in traffic or rankings at any point.
My concern is that if I work towards getting the more ominous looking links removed (directories, reciprocal links from irrelevant sites etc.), either manually or with the disavow tool, how can I be sure that I am not removing links that are in fact helping our campaign?
Are we likely to suffer from the next Penguin update if we chose to proceed without moving the aforementioned links? or is Google only likely to target the serious black hat links (link farms etc.)?
Any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
-
This is another tricky situation. I think the message you have received is not about Penalty, it is just a precautionary message send to you just to inform that the link profile does not look natural and needs some pruning. What I believe is that if the links not coming from low quality link pages, directories, forums, web 2.0 sites etc [I am assuming that they are at one point built by an SEO company], you need to get rid of them.
_Take it as precautionary measure because your link profile has already raised the flag of spam and therefore, it is your duty to clean it. It is better safe than sorry. And Losing one or two keyword rank is far better than losing all the visibility altogether. _
-
This post can help http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath
There are many free and paid tools that can help determine if you need to delete a link
http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/If you understand Spanish this post can help
http://luissobrevilla.com/como-eliminar-backlinks-de-mala-calidad/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Why homepage is not getting cached by Google ?
It has been more than 2-3 months that I didn't notice that our website homepage is not getting cached by Google ?? i don't know why?? help me please, thanks in advance. Regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | spellblaster
Spel why.PNG0 -
2015 Bing Disavow, should i copy and paste from Google?
So I just submitted my 2nd disavow file to Google, but what about Bing? I know i would have to submit one url at a time, but is it worth it? Is it safe yet to submit the same file from Google? I know Bing measures quantity of links and submitting the same file might hurt my rankings, but anything new in 2015?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Disavow links leading to 404
Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text. These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Potential spam issue - back links
Hi - we have a client whom we work with for SEO. During a review we noticed in Webmaster Tools, there was an IP address with over 30,000 links to our clients site. The IP address is 92.60.0.123. From looking up the IP address details, it looks like it is based in Europe - but we are unable to establish what it is, where the links are and who created it. We are concerned it could be a potential spammer trying to cause an issue with the SEO campaign. Is there any way of finding out any more details apart from the basic information about the location of the IP address? Also - if we submit a disavow via webmaster tools, we are unsure what issue it will have on the clients site if we do not know what it is and the type of links it is creating. Any ideas? Thanks for your help! Phil.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
It's not link buying, but...
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow. You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Unnatural Link Profile
Hi All, We are about to take on a new client whose site has been penalised for having a very unnatural link profile. They have over 1k links, which have 5 differing anchor texts, though the majority leans towards one particular phrase. Their previous SEO company had done this for them and the strategy worked, keeping them in the top 3 for most phrases, until Penguin. Now they reside in the 70-100 ranks. My initial though is we need to get rid of a lot of these links, however its going to be labour intensive and as we all know, labour is expensive. The website is nicely designed and has lots of great unique content. Its just the link profile letting it down. My question is; If this were your client, what would you recommend? A link removal program which could take a long time and be very expensive or would you recommend that they start again and build a new site, also expensive and time consuming. or would you suggest something different? If anyone knows of any Link removal people who have done a good job in the past I'd love to get some contact details. Thanks Aran
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chiefblob0 -
Google Penalising Pages?
We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers. For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages. The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away! Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows. This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected. We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around? Link - removed Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time. Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will. Thanks, Scott
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scottlucas0