Disavow Tool - WWW or Not?
-
Hi All,
Just a quick question ... A shady domain linking to my website is indexed in Google for both example.com and www.example.com. If I wan't to disavow the entire domain, do I need to submit both:
domain:www.example.com
domain:example.com
or just:
domain:example.com
Cheers!
-
To clear up any uncertainty, I think there are two questions being asked:
- Link to be disavowed: Do I disavow both the www and non-www versions of a bad link?
- Site you own: Which site in webmaster tools do I upload the disavow list to - www or non-www?
The link to be disavowed is an easy answer because in most cases if you want a link disavowed, you probably don't want a link from that domain (because its suspect, de-indexed, etc.). Therefore you can simply blanket it with domain:badwebsite.com. This will be sure to get any link from this site to yours, regardless of the subdomain (i.e. www.badwebsite.com, ww2.badwebsite.com, forum.badwebsite.com, etc.)
Answer #2 isn't quite as easy. The safest (and arguably proper) way is to link mine both the www and non-www versions of your website and treat each as a separate site (as Google does). Even if you are using 301 redirects or canonicals I still recommend this method. In many cases, one version will have a much smaller backlink volume. In any case, pick out the bad links and try to get them removed by emailing the website. Once the attempt has been made, Compile the remaining backlinks (still in separate lists for www and non-www), and upload them to their respective disavow tool areas.
-
The correct syntax, whether there is a www or not is to use domain:example.com. this will disavow both the www and the non www.
-
Just to be clear can someone answer this for me?
I am about to disavow some links and when I get to webmaster tools I have both the www.site.com and site.com and it's asking me to select one. Which one do I pick to disavow the links?........www or non-www?
-
If you use:
domain:example.com
then this will disavow www.example.com, example.com and all pages coming from this domain.
-
Based on the situation, I would only disavow the ones that are indexed and be sure to keep track of your work. The Read More link I posted above explains everything you need to know. You should also check both versions (www and non) of the back links to your site.
another quote from that page:
'Note: When looking at the links to your site in Webmaster Tools, you may want to verify both the www and the non-vww version of your domain in your Webmaster Tools account. To Google, these are entirely different sites. Take a look at the data for both sites.'
-
Hi Sean - Thanks for your reply. That means we'd have to check for all domains we want to disavow whether both versions are indexed or not. Or disavow both versions just to be be on the safe side...
-
Hi Sean - Thanks for your reply. I just edited my question, maybe it wasn't very easy to understand. I was just wondering if to disavow a domain that has both WWW and not-WWW versions indexed in Google, I had to disavow both:
domain:www.example.com
domain:example.com
or just:
domain:example.com
I understand the risks of using the disavow tool and asking for the links to be removed is no longer an option.
-
No do not do this.
Which version do you want to keep? You will need to look at the data to determine which version is the most linked to. Than just redirect www to non www or vice versa. You should also setup both non www and www versions of Google webmaster tools.
Also in the version you want to keep, go to your google webmaster tools>configuration>settings and than define which version yo want.
Disvow tool should be considered the last resource for removing links to your site that are shady.
-
Hi Carlos,
Remove both Google looks at them as two separate sites. However, I would not recommend using Google disavow tool unless the linking page is not accessible, or the webmaster of the linking site will not take it down after a couple attempts.
"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." Read More
This should help.
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
-
Disavow File and SSL Conversion Question
Moz Community, So we have a website that we are moving to SSL. It has been 4 years since we submitted our disavow file to google via GWT. We decided to go through our backlinks and realized that many domains we are disavowing currently (under Since we are moving to SSL I understand Google looks at this as a new site. Therefore, we decided to go through our backlinks and realized that many domains we are disavowing currently are no longer active (after 4 years this is expected). Therefore, is it ok to create a new disavow file with the new profile on GW (ssl version of our site)? Also, is it ok the new GW disavow file doesn't include urls we previously disavowed with the non https version? Some links from the old disavow we found were disavowed but they shouldn't have been. Moreover, we found new links we wanted to disavow as well. Thanks QL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearner0 -
Do you know if there is a tool that can tell you if a url have backlink?
Hi, Do you know if there is a tool that I can check backlinks for thousands of URLs Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg454540 -
Lost Links in Google Webmaster Tools
Last week I had over 1800 backlinks showing up in GWT. 4 days ago I had 20, and now I have 5. I have a very diverse link profile ranging from social bookmarks to YouTube, to Business Listings (Yelp, etc), and they're all gone. Clearly there is not a particular segment of my links that are being targeted here, they've all been completely wiped out. My rankings have fallen, and where I was on page 1/2 for all my targeted KWs, I'm now on Page 3, 4, and 5. There are no penalties showing up in GWT, so I'm completely at a loss as to what is going on. Please help! Website is: http://brownboxbranding.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBick0 -
Redirecting non-www pages to www ones
Hello:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm trying to consolidate all the link juice and see that some of my pages are linked to by using both www.mysite.com/whatever.html and mysite.com/whatever.html.
Is there a safe re-write rule that not just redirects non-www(s) to www(s), but designates the redirect as 301, so link juice will be transfered as well. If not RewriteRule, are there any other ways to accoplishe this? And the last question: can this be solved by simply setting Preffered domain in google webmaster tools to display www URL? Any help will be appreciated.0 -
Disavowel tool.
Hello, One of my sites has a strange link profile; it has 40000 in bound links but 30000 of them are from the site http://ourlipsaresealed.skynetblogs.be/ with the anchor text "haarstijl (2)" which is dutch for hairstyles. I haven't paid for or even asked for these links and I don't think its negative seo. I think they just set up a template with hundreds of links they thought were useful to their visitors and produce several pages a day. So the question is do I use the new google disavowel tool? I've held off so far because A. they link to a competitor who haven't been anywhere near as affected as we have although they seem to have been affected to an extent by a drop for some reason and they have a much better link profile overall than mine. and B. in the video Matt cutts goes on over and over that this tool is for people that have done some dodgy link building in the past but I haven't. Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Google Disavow Tool - Waste of Time
My humble opinion is that Google's disavow tool.... is a utter waste of your time! My site, http://goo.gl/pdsHs was penalized over a year ago after the SEO we hired used black hat techniques to increase ranking. Ironically, while having visibility, Google itself had become a customer. (I guess the site was pretty high quality, trust worthy and user friendly enough for Google employees to purchase from.) Soon enough the message about detecting unnatural links had shown up on the webmaster tools and as expected, our rankings sank and out of view. For a year we had contacted webmasters, asking them remove links pointing back to us. 90% didn't respond, the other 10% complied). Work on our site continued, adding high quality, highly relevant unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime85
Rankings never recovered and neither did our traffic or business….. Earlier this month, we learned about Google’s "link disavow tool" and were excited! We had hoped that following the cleanup instruction, using the “link disavow tool”, we would get a chance at recovery!
We watched Matt Cutts’ video, read the various forums/blogs/topics online that were written about it, and then we felt comfortable enough to use it... We went through our backlink profile, determining which links were either spammy or seemed a result of black hat practices or the links added by a 3rd party possibly interested in our demise and added them to a .txt file. We submitted the file via the disavow tool and followed with another reconsideration request. The result came a couple of weeks later… the same cookie cutter email in the WMT suggesting that there are “unnatural links” to the site. Hope turned to disappointment and frustration. Looks like the big box companies will continue to populate the top 100 results of ANY search, the rest will help Google’s shareholders… If your site has gotten in the algorithm crosshairs, you have a better chance of recovering by changing your URL than messing around with this useless tool.0 -
Best tool to calculate link distribution?
What is the best tool to calculate the total link distribution throughout a site? I know opensiteexplorer.com's "top pages" breaks down the numbers for you? Are there any others?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0