Lost rankings after disavowing links
-
About two months ago, I received an unnatural inbound links message from Google. Then I disavowed 58 (the worst ones) and now I can see that right after the date I submitted my disavow file I'm losing rankings. What would you suggest?
I don't really want to revoke my disavow file because it has totally bad links.
I have this idea to build 58 links from high quality sites (instead of the 58 I disavowed). Do you think it'll work faster (if at all) or I just need to remove my disavow file?
-
Nope. still no luck (
-
Vince/Tom/Michael,
Any updates?
I just did a second round of disavowing and am seeing a substantial drop.
-
Vince,
I too have seen the same after using disavow. I did not have a manual penalty, but noticed some ranking drops related to Penguin, or Panda, or whichever was spammy links. I got rid of a bunch of low quality links and noticed a drop, not instantly but after about 1 month.
My question for you Vince, is have you seen an improvement since then? I am hoping you have!
-
Thanks, David. Yeah, I totally feel like I should not have done that
but your shared experience gives me hope.
-
Thanks for your reply, Tom. Thing is, I added my bad links to the disavow tool but I did not send a reconsideration request because because disavowed links seem to be triggered by major algo updates as well. It looks that mine was triggered by the one that happened on July 18. Do you think I still need to email Google and ask to reconsider?
-
Like you Vince, I went through the process of disavowing a number of links with Google and Bing and yes a week or so later I started to see a big rank dips. The links had been sending traffic that skewed my bounce rate and visitor page time rate, quite literally adding 1000's of visitors a month. Now after a few months the site has returned to its normal monthly stats and rankings are back to normal. But it took about 2-3 months for this to all work through.
I know how you feel 'Why did I do that? darn it' but I think like Tom says it's better to stick out and not remove the disavow file and focus on building good content for people to link too.
David
-
Hi Vince
What happened when you disavowed the links? Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?
Until you get a message saying the manual penalty has been lifted, it won't matter what you do to your rankings or links - they'll keep on going down.
I'd definitely keep the disavow file in there (and add to it if needs be) and keep filing reconsideration requests until the penalty has been lifted.
It's worth noting as well that sometimes these bad links will be powering up your site. I mean, one of the reasons people use bad links, for black-hat reasons, is because they can and do work. However, they're not sustainable in my eyes. If you've built a site with bad links, you're effectively a ticking time bomb and that's probably not the healthiest way to do business - at least in my opinion.
So disavowing those links could quite conceivably been the cause for the drop in rankings (even if you didn't have a penalty), but you're much healthier in the long run. My recommendation - after getting that penalty removed first and foremost - would be to replace those links with high quality and authoritative ones, as you have mentioned.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links?
Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | lincolndigitalgroup1 -
Rankings just took a wallop in the last hour.
Has anyone else checked their rankings today and noticed a big shift? We just got smacked by G big time.
Reporting & Analytics | | Progauto0 -
Link being indexed
So I found this link to my website on the huffington post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/california-car-insurance-rates-vary-study_n_2122614.html it's at the bottom in the "around the web" section. My question is this article has been around for almost 4 months yet the link does not show up in WMT. I would like to know if the link to http://www.shiftins.com is indexed and passing authority. Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | jameswalkerson0 -
Trackbacks vs Links: What's the Difference?
Our Google Analytics social pages report isn't showing several of our links. And several links are from high quality sources, such as about.com. Does anyone know why this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?
I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic. Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me: Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something. Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.
Reporting & Analytics | | LilyRay0 -
Tool to check pervious rankings for a keyword ?
I am looking a tool/site to check ranking history of specifc keyword . Is this possible ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bfletc40 -
Linking domains vs Inbound Links
Hello, Whats the diference between Linking domains and Inbound links in Open Site Explorer? And also with is most important to analyze? Tks in advance! Pedro Pereira
Reporting & Analytics | | PedroM18 -
High percentage of nofollow links
Hi, I've just created my first campaign and noticed that on the competitive analysis our website is having a lot of nofollow links: more than 50% I did some research on the web to learn more about nofollow links, but I don't understand why this percentage is so big especially compared to the other websites in the analysis (less than 10%)? Anyone any ideas? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | poupette0