Has anyone had experience with the Disavow Links tool? If so did you notice positive results from it?
-
I recently noticed a large number of backlinks from low authority directories coming in for one of my clients. These links were either purchased from a competitor or from a directory service site that knows we might be willing to pay to have bad links removed. I've contacted the website admin and they require a payment of $.30 per link to have them removed from their directory. Has anyone had a similar experience? I'm also considering using the disavow tool but I've heard the outcome of using this tool is usually bad. I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks!
-
I am trying to put together a set of rules to help decide which links directory is harmful & warrants a removal.
- directory has xxx & gambling listing
- Directory is no longer in google database (site:domain.com shows no results). I take this as google penalty.
- Directory's home page & page where my link exists has low Mozrank, PR
- My link is site wide on the directory
Suggestion & recommendations welcome.
-
The thing with the disavow tool is that Google doesn't necessarily count all the links you submit as bad. If they think you have submitted a link by mistake then they will ignore it. That is why people are encouraged to get them taken down rather than just use the disavow tool. There is no point submitting a reconsideration request if you haven't had an unnatural links warning, if anything you are just drawing attention to yourself!
-
I don't really completely understand what you mean by "bad", as long as you can prove you tried to remove them your self (I.e emailed the site owner) then it correct procedure would be disavow which would then remove anything that link may pass onto your site.
Obviously it could be seen as bad if you remove good links and remember your link profile will be made up of low links its how a natural link profile will look if you only had high PR sites pointed to you it would look suspicious and would no doubt get you a penalty.
Are the back links really causing you to loose more than if you were to remove them ?
Hope this help.
-
Hope that helps Aaron.
-
Many webmasters, such as yourself are cautious and hesitant to use the disavow tool.
I would document that you contacted the webmaster and they required a payment of $.30 per links to have them removed, and send that info over to google after you use the disavow and put in a reconsideration request.
"Use the disavow tool like a machete" - Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/#comment-86419
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
-
Is linking out to different websites with the same C-Block IP bad for SEO?
Many SEOs state that getting (too many) links from the same C-Block IP is bad practice and should be avoided. Is this also applicable if one website links out to different websites with the same C-Block IP? Thus, website A, B and C (on the same server) link to website D (different server) could be seen as spam but is this the same when website D links to website A, B and C?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
What do you say in your emails to horrible sites to remove your links?
Morning guys, I've the unenviable task of having to rectify poor link building (a previous company's work, not mine) which inevitably means emailing tons and tons of horrible directories with links to the client from as far back as 5/6 years ago. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat so it begs the question: What have you said to these types of sites that is effective in getting them to remove the links? This could even be a two/three-parter: If you've had little joy in requesting removals, have you dis-avowed the links, and what (if any) effect did it have? Thanks, M.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Ask Bloggers/Users To Link To Website
I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains. Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service. This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP. Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions. Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marcuslind0 -
Has anyone used tribepro.com
Does that concept really work. Any experience? I've registered and so far I think it's hard to measure whether the shares are spam or genuine. Would love to see it works for someoneThanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Clear out Spammy Links
I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmandaJ0 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0 -
Good link networks?
Hey Mozzers, quick question about link networks. I've identified quite a few, like these: Build My Rank Unique Article Wizard Authority Link Network Article Ranks EZ Article Link Socialadr Linkvana SEO LinkVine Does anyone have experience using any of these? The basic premise is they own or their members own tons of different blogs. You write an article, give it to them, they publish it one one of those blogs. You include a link in your article. Done. They charge a monthly fee to use and all that, so is it worth it? Anyone had any success with them? Finding mixed things on forums online, and since many of their websites like awfully spammy, wanted to poll the Mozzers and get your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0