Thoughts on Proactive Link Disavow
-
One of my newish hobby sites has began to attract some crappy links - as per Google Webmaster Tools, Links To Your Site report. The typical .ru and .pl kind of crap that seems to seep into all somewhat successful sites' link profiles.
I have not received any notifications or penalties, BUT I am considering proactively disavowing these, but wanted to bounce this idea off some other SEOs before proceeding.
Cheers!
-
David,
I am in a similar situation and considering using the Disavow tool, although there seems to be some folks here who are fearful of it.
Wondering what you ended up doing?
-
Thanks for the reply, Michael. Issue is, these aren't the kind of sites that are easily contactable, and even if I did hunt down contact details, I wouldn't expect a reply from them.
-
Thanks for the reply and the link, will definitely check it out.
-
I completely agree with Sheldon. I've been in the position to pre-empt a potential slap by requesting removals (repeatedly) then Disavow. I am no expert but in my opinion as long as there are removal requests as backup and to put in Sheldon's words the pruning is for health and diseased reasons rather than purely ornamental it shows good intent.
-
David, I've done a couple of proactive pruning jobs and it beats waiting 'til you've been slapped. The comments on that video are mostly uninformed, in my opinion. Disavow has worked for my clients.
You might want to watch this short hangout sponsored by Arnie Kuenn, on the topic. We discussed proactive link pruning as well. http://intrinsicvalueseo.com/googles-disavow-process-and-penguin-recovery/ Feel free to give me a shout if you like.
-
If anyone else is interested in this topic, Enrico Altavilla pointed me in the direction of this Matt Cutts video, which encourages the practice. The comments are pretty damming, however.
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
-
Swiss based, USA links only
Hello, My company is based is Switzerland with a Swiss address and US number but my client are only in the USA. I only have links from US websites and no Swiss website. Can I be penalised by google for that ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Tumblr links
I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Confusion about forums and canonical links
Like many people, I get a lot of alerts about duplicate content, etc. I also don't know if I am hurting my domain authority because of the forum. It is a pretty active forum, so it is important to the site. So my question is, right now there could be 50 pages like this <domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrickPicker
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-1
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-2
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-3
all the way to:
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-50</domain></domain></domain></domain></domain> So right now the rel canonical links are set up just like above, including the page numbers. I am not sure if that is the best way or not. I really thought that all the of links for that topic should be
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/ that way it would passing "juice" to the main topic/link. </domain> I do have other links setup for:
link rel='next',link rel='up',link rel='last' Overall is this correct, or is there a better way to do it?0 -
Create a link or redirect?
We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages. Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority. These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site. I am wondering if I should: A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages? B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page? C)Set up a redirect to our homepage? Any advice? Thanks, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Disavow Subdomain?
Hi all, I've been checking and it seems like there are only 2 options when disavowing links with Google's tool. Disavow the link: http://spam.example.com/stuff/content.htm Disavow the domain: domain: example.com What can I do if I want do disavow a subdomain? i.e. spam.site.com I'm also assuming that if I were to disavow the domain it would include all subdomains? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Am I buying links according to Google?
I have the opportunity to sponsor a variety of sections in a variety of .edu sites. Really appealing since they will both provide high quality traffic as well as to help our rankings... (maybe 🙂 )... Anyway this opportunity involves a monetary exchange, no different than advertising in Adwords and/or buying a display ad with the NYT. The links will be both text and banner... With follow links. My questions to you guys are: Is this practice penalize? And will display ads pass link juice also? Thanks for the help...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo10 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050