Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?

[sanj5050]

Hi guys,

I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically.

I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool.

The question I had was..

Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet..

Look forward to your replies on this...

[DennisSeymour]

Im assuming you dont have any existing penalties, you just dropped those links into the disavow to clean up the link profile right?

If so, then you will notice a drop in ranking within 2 weeks usually (if the site benefited from those links)

Building new links, content and doing outreach shouldnt be a problem to it. It will just do it's own thing.

[customerparadigm.com]

Yes, I can understand having impatient clients.

My assumption is that Google's system should theoretically allow you to do what you want to do, and not punish you for great inbound links and well-crafted content.  Hopefully Google goes with the assumption that the disavow tool, as a tool of last result, is going to be used by responsible web marketers.  And if this is the case, you should be fine to continue.

However, the safer recommendation would be to tell your clients that due to their spammy inbound link profile, you need to wait until this is cleared up until you put more content out there.  That's what I would tell them.  You could use a car analogy: don't worry about rotating the tires on your car today, if you have to replace all four tires next week.  It's money wasted.

But because we just really don't know, and it's too new of a tool and used mostly in dire cases that there hasn't been a lot of data compiled on it.

Please let us know how it goes, and what route the client decides to take.... so we can generate some correlative data on this...

[sanj5050]

Hi, Jeff,

Thanks for the response.

It's tough because the client is a little impatient....like a lot of clients that wan't to "get things moving" which is why I was thinking to start the content creation and outreach even though the current spam links have not been deleted/disavowed. However I see how this might not be the best option...

It would be really useful to know if the search engines still value authority links pointing to a site that has been penalised the same way as they value authority links to  a site that hasnt been penalised..

Look forward to your reply,

[customerparadigm.com]

There hasn't been a tremendous amount of research done on this, as it's often the option of last resort.

I'd say to be safe, create the content but put it in a staging area.  And then when Google has re-indexed / eliminated those spammy inbound links, push out the new content.

That's the safest route to go, I think...  and what I'd do if it was my client.