Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
-
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website?
Thanks
-
Hi Marie,
You are absolutely correct. I was confused. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Carla
-
You may be confused about what the disavow tool does. Sure, you can put any site in your disavow file. You're basically telling Google that if they crawl that site and find a link on it that is pointing to yours to not pass any Pagerank through the link. Google has said several times that they do not use disavow info against the disavowed sites. It is not a spam report.
-
Hi Jessy,
Well I am glad to see that I am not the only person with the same issue. I really delayed the whole submitting my competitors to Google spam but they continue to use black hat techniques. I will let you know if it works.
Thanks
Carla
-
Yes Carla it does make sense and thank you for the explanation.
I too am working in an industry where all of my competitors who outrank me are using blackhat tactics and they haven't been penalized for it at all. It's quite frustrating and I'd be lying if I hadn't considered submitting them to the Webspam team. However I worry that this will somehow come back to bite us later on so I haven't done so and probably never will. Instead I continue building quality content and trying to organically build authority.
That all said, I'd love it if you kept us posted. I'd really like to know how this all works out for you. Even though you are in another country, it might be a great indicator of the potential problems/benefits to this tactic.
Thanks
-
Hi Jesse and Tuzzell,
We have several competitors that use constant black hat techniques. They have been doing this for over 2 years and for some reason the Google Algorithm updates are not taking effect. We have stuck to white hat techniques but are getting a bit impatient. For over 2 years our black hat competitors continue to outrank us. We waited 2 years before submitting them to Google Spam and the only reason we did it was because they have not stopped using black hat techniques. It's a bit frustrating. We are not going on a spam crusade...its more like helping Google do their job and testing the Argentina Google Spam team and learning more about SEO. BTW, we also submitted ourselves to the Google Spam Team about 2 years back to see if our links were in line with Google's policies.
Hope it makes sense...
Carla
-
I can't wrap my head around why you would want to do this and what you seek to gain from it..?
Tuzzell is right, the answer is no.. but I absolutely am dying to know why you are leading the Spam Crusade? (I'm not against it.. nor am I for it.. I'm totally neutral so far just curious why)
-
Short answer no.
To use the disavow tool you need to be logged into webmaster tools, and you need to use the disavow tool under the profile of the relavent site. As such Google will know that any links you are trying to disavow are associated with, and only authorised for, the site you have signed in under.
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
-
Getting Spam Links
Hi There, I am planning to Disavow one spam domain but when check Google cache it shows my client domain name. So if I disavow this spam domain which link Google considered? Please help me. Thanks Satla
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TrulyTravel0 -
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
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 -
Is Inter-linking websites together good or bad for SEO?
I know of a website that inter-links a handful of websites together (ex- coloring.ws interlinks to a handful of other sites, including dltk-kids.com, and others). Is this negative for SEO? I was thinking about creating a few related sites and inter-linking all of them together, since they will all be relevant to each other. Any thoughts would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?
I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zorsto0 -
Cutting off the bad link juice
Hello, I have noticed that there is plenty of old low quality links linking to many of the landing pages. I would like to cut them off and start again. Would it be ok to do the following?: 1. create new URLs (domain is quite string and new pages are ranking good and better than the affected old landing pages) and add the old content there 2. 302 redirect old landing pages to the new ones 3. put "no index" tag on the old URLs (maybe even "no index no follow"?)or it wouldn't work? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ThinkingJuice0 -
Internal Link Structure
Hello Everyone, I'd be grateful for a little feedback please; This is my site, the home page
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TwoPints
of which is targeting the phrase jobs in **** (I'm sure you can fill i the gap
:)) I've made a few changes recently which has included having the
Contract jobs in **** | Permanent Jobs in **** | Temporary Jobs in **** & Today’s
jobs in **** links added to the homepage... Perhaps foolishly and impatiently, I did all of these at the
same time, whilst also changing the sites internal link structure, specifically
for all links to the homepage, which previously were like <a<br>href="/">Home and have now been changed to <a<br>href="/">jobs in ****</a<br></a<br> Meaning that I have 4500 internal links with the anchor text
'jobs in ****' But rather than seeing an improvement n my SERPs ranking, I have
gone from page 2 of Google to page 6, and falling...... Apart from being inpatient, what have I done wrong? Many thanks0 -
Ditching of spammy links - will it be of benefit?
Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'. Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions. I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full. Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | themegroup0