Best practice to disavow spammy links
-
Hi Forum,
I'm trying to quantify the logic for removing spammy links.
I've read the article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings.Based on my pivot chart results, I see around 55% of my backlinks at zero pagerank.
Q: Should I simply remove all zero page rank links or carry out an assessment based on the links (zero pagerank) DA / PA. If so what are sensible DA and/or PA metrics?
Q: What other factors should be taken into consideration, such as anchor text etc.
-
I would never get rid of links simply based on pagerank (or DA/PA). I would evaluate my links based on whether or not they were natural or self-made.
The first thing you need to decide though before slashing links is whether or not your links are actually hurting you. If your rankings dropped it doesn't necessarily have to be because of spammy links as there are many algorithm factors that could be in play.
Now, if your rankings dropped significantly on a Penguin refresh day, then yes, you could consider removing or disavowing the links. Most SEOs agree that the key to recovering from Penguin is to do that. You may not even have to remove them. Just disavowing is likely enough for Penguin. But no one can say for sure because Penguin hasn't refreshed since the disavow tool was released.
But be careful messing around with the disavow tool. I've seen sites that had other issues such as Panda or site structure issues that went and cut a bunch of potentially spammy links out and damaged their rankings even further.
-
-
It appears that their are. Duke Tanson wrote a really good article regarding using the disavow tool. He shares that the tool he used for this task was http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/ - stating, "I got all the contact details of the domains I wanted to remove using this tool."
-
If you know for certain the links are negatively impacting your site, I would probably send a couple of emails to the webmaster over the course of a week or two. This would show that you have tried multiple times to resolve the issue and give the webmaster time to resolve the issue for you. If multiple weeks have passed with no reply, you may have to take matters into your own hands with the disavow tool.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
-
Thanks for your reply.
I have a couple of further questions.
Q: Are there any free tools or free online services that I can use to gather a live email address for a given site.
Q: Additionally, how long from sending "Removal Link" email before using Disavow?
-
Yup. Those look pretty spammy.
You should first try to contact the webmaster of these sites and request that your links be removed.
Google wants you to try as hard as you can to personally get your links removed from spammy sites prior to using the Disavow tool. It is also recommended that you save email correspondence between yourself and these webmasters to prove to Google you are actively trying to clean up your backlinks.
Does that help?
Mike
-
If they have a PR of 0, it would probably be worth your time to contact the webmaster and request you link be removed.
I do not believe that getting those types of backlinks removed would do any harm on your site. It would probably be more beneficial than anything.
Good luck.
Mike
-
Mike, this is very helpful information for me as well.
I'm curious - I also discovered I have links with 0 PR and have been wondering if I should put some time in to get them removed. Not with the disavow tool, but by writing to the webmaster or seeing if there is sanything on those sites that allows me to request that my link be removed. I also have not received any messages or warnings in GWT about penalties.. I did have a major drop in The SERPs for a couple of my keywords -still healthy for others and my business name URL. Do you feel it could do harm if I were to try to get the links removed?
-
Matt Cutts says that you should use the disavow link tool very carefully and only in certain circumstances.
I found this article very helpful: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
And according to Google Webmaster Tools , "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
Hope this information answers your questions.
Mike
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
-
What's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Reuse an old juicy URL or create a new with the best practices?
I'm optimizing a site with all new URL`s, categories, titles, descriptions. All URL's will change but I've old URLs with a lot of backlinks, SEO juice. What is better for SEO with them: 1 - Change those URLs and 301 redirect traffic to the new page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
2 - Keep the URL and work just on new title, description, etc. In option 1 I understand that I'll lose some SEO juice because of the redirect, but the new URL will be correct. In option 2 everything will be strong except from the URL that will make less sense than with option 1. It will not exactly match the product name, title. It`s a reuse of a strong URL.0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
ECommcerce internal linking structure best practice
Hi, Can anyone advise on the best internal linking practice for an eCommerce website? Should the introduction copy on each category page contain naturally placed links down to sub categories and products and should each sub category link back up to the main category page. Is there a 'best practice' method of linking categories, sub categories and products? In terms of internal linking product pages, I presume the best practice would be to link other relevant products to each each? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmiffysUK0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Doubt with no follow links: disavow or no action?
We have a google penalty (artificial links) we have checked our link profile with link detox, and we found that a group of links that has no follow tag have been classified as toxic (stats websites mostly). But should we remove those links or what? They are no follow, it shoud be enough. Should we include this links on the spreadsheet anyway? Should we include and add "no action taken"? How would you proceed in that case? Note: I know link detox is not great, but it helped us to collect data. But we have now to make decisions about the results, and I'm new on this and I have doubts. I would appreciate your help Thank you!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0