What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
-
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
-
Why do you want to remove the file? Are you concerned that you may have disavowed links that you shouldn't have?
When you remove the file, then as Google recrawls each of the sites that were listed in your file, they will re-avow them which means that they will once again start to give you the link equity that comes from that link. If it's a good link then you'll regain some good link equity. (But then this begs the question of why you would disavow it to start with.) If it's an unnatural link then at first what will likely happen is nothing as Google will not give you any benefit for this type of link. But, if you've got enough unnatural links then the next time that Google runs the Penguin algorithm your site will look less trustworthy when it comes to links and you could see a drop in rankings.
It's complicated though. If you are already under the effects of Penguin and you filed a disavow and then you removed your disavow then really nothing would happen.
I wouldn't recommend removing your disavow file unless you feel that you have accidentally disavowed links that are good ones. If you're not sure if you've done that then you should consider having someone review your links for you and give you an idea of which ones should be disavowed.
-
Thanks again Chris, I will take on board your advice and go through the disavow file.
-
It's risky only you know whats in the disavow file you can always go through it and see if there are any links in there that maybe don't need to be in there just may want to be careful not to seem like you're trying to manipulate Google but overall it's a bit like changing lots of no follow links to follow.
If you want to try it you can try it on the safe site and analyze whats in there and over time see how taking a few links out at a time see if you get an impact its a bit more controlled as well as if something goes wrong you can see what links caused it.
Google has said its good to be proactive and remove bad links before they are a problem and its perfectly normal however I've seen people overreact a bit to this advice and remove links that where natural etc. so whats best for return on your time removing disavow or working on getting more links.
Here are some helpful links -
http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
"This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
Hope that some of the above gives you an idea
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response. the question has been bothering me for a while and I wonder if there is anyone else who was advised to remove bad links even if one has not had a manual penalty, but may have seen a decline in traffic.
We saw a drop in traffic, but last week we removed all Google tracking analysis and reinstalled it, and bam the traffic that we thought we had lost was not so bad after all. (we are still monitoring this) Hence why I was wondering if we were to remove the disavow fill will Google see this a a negative.
-
The Disavow file is basically telling Google to turn the links into no follows or in other words you don't want to be associated with the sites. Removing the file could do one of two things give you a penalty if you were proactively removing bad sites it may give you a boost in search if you had some random urls in there. You want to ask your self why you put the links in there in the first place.
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
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Site rankings steadily decreasing - do I need to remove links?
Since mid-April, our ranking have been steadily declining. Our two main keywords are 'nuts and bolts' and 'bolts and nuts'. 'nuts and bolts' dropped from 7th to 46th in May and has recovered slightly to 28th, and 'bolts and nuts' moved from 7th to 16th, and is today 24th. Ranking on keywords we specialise in have fared better, but they're fairly niche. 'bsw bolts' has moved from 2nd to 4th, and 'imperial bolts' has moved from 1st to 4th. I think my link profile is the issue. I don't think we've been penalised by Penguin directly (I may be wrong, I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term as 'bolts and nuts' after Penguin if we had been penalised.), but I think what's happened is that sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does that sound right? Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Do I need to delete all the directory links? We do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. Should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Or should I just concentrate on building better links? I'm not sure where to start! Any advice is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
How to remove non-requested, non-desired backlinks
Dear Mosers, Before Penguin update we start a link back profile study about who and why are linking and we found hundred of garbage sites like these: http://rakeback-blogger.com/links/ http://personalinjuryattorney-fl.org/get-a-fl-personal-injury-attorney-instead-of-crying-over-spilt-milk and hundred more... They don't have contact form or email address, so what is the best way to remove our link from there (there are any quick way), these sites are damaging our rank. Thank you for your help Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
How to place two NADs on site (One website, 2 locations)
Hello, For our site: nlpca(dot)com we have 2 locations. One location is based out of a hotel in California, and one location is where we have our offices in Utah. Our site is about both locations, emphisizing California. Do we need to create a Utah page and put the Utah NAD on that page with separate address and phone number? What do we use as an address since we only have a hotel room in California now? What do we need to do to rank for both in the natural and also Places listings? Right now we're #1 for NLP California and #4 for NLP Utah Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0