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)?
-
Definitely just disavow. John Mueller from Google said in a hangout that you should not be paying for link removal unless for some reason you feel that you have inconvenienced the site owner and feel that you ought to pay for the link to be removed. In the same hangout a Google employee, Mariya said, "No! Don't pay for link removal! That's what the disavow tool is for." I've transcribed the video and given my thoughts on it here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/should-you-pay-for-link-removal/
-
Totally agree with everyone here. I wouldn't, under any circumstance, pay for a link to be removed. I was reading a blog post written by Google the other day about it. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html
Matt Cutts says in the post "In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves."
Google are good at spotting these types of links and not counting them especially if there is a strong backlink profile. I'd just disavow at domain level.
-
Thanks Rand,
I appreciate the feedback. I think our approach to this issue is more clear now - we'll include some documentation to hopefully prevent others from being extorted.
-
Definitely agree with Rand. When you submit your requests, send Google a note saying that the person is trying to get you to pay to have the links removed, possibly even including the email/text that stated he wanted you to pay. I doubt it will take them long to respond. I would NOT pay the person a dime. Submitting the request via the clients webmaster account should take care of the damage.
"That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile."
Google's disavow tool is made for this. Otherwise, a competitor could submit your site to as many bad places as they wanted, and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. As long as you submit a complete report of all the links in question, you should be fine.
"We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick."
Ninja? More like a clown, lol.
-
Yeah, disavowing should have the same effect as if the links were removed, so you're better off submitting the disavow.
-
Hey William,
Thanks for the reply. The disavow option seems to be pretty popular from what I've gathered so far - I agree with you about the financial part of the process feeling a little extort-y.
That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile. Presuming most of the directories have been adjusted algorithmically to provide almost no SEO value - it seems to add more points in going the disavow route.
-
I'm in agreement with William. If you proactively submit the disavow file, you should be protected. I'd also think about sending a note via Webmaster Tools to let Google know about the network and that this person is extorting you/your site by forcing payment to remove links. That may help others whom Google might penalize for this in the future if they refuse to pay (and paying it forward like that is a great way to serve the web community and discourage future spam extortionists).
-
Just disavow. Don't let people like this extort you. If you want to get him to try and remove the links for free, tell him you're not going to pay him, and instead you're going to submit a disavow, flagging his entire network to Google as unwanted links. You made a good faith effort by contacting the webmaster, but being extorted goes beyond good faith.
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
-
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
URL Re-Writes & HTTPS: Link juice loss from 301s?
Our URLs are not following a lot of the best practices found here: http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls We have also been waiting to implement HTTPS. I think it might be time to take the plunge on re-writing the URLs and converting to a fully secure site, but I am concerned about ranking dips from the lost link juice from the 301s. Many of our URLs are very old, with a decent amount of quality links. Are we better off leaving as is or taking the plunge?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Disavow- What Happens and What Should I Do?
We have a site that got hit by a non-manual penalty in July really hard. I submitted a disavow file for the site placeyourlinks.com which had a bunch of clearly spammy links to the site listed in Webmaster tools. But the site itself was down for a long time so I couldn't see where the links even were. Then those links disappeared from the links file. I thought the urls were removed or the site was seen as being blank. But now they're back...and the site itself is shown as just being a blank page. I don't know what to do since I don't want to disavow those links again if it wasn't even addressed the first time and there is obviously no way to contact the site. Help! Also, I've done a bunch of work on the site to increase the amount of content while I was waiting to see what happened with the link disavow. But now all that is done and our rankings are still waaaay down. I'm considering getting really, really aggressive with link removal and disavowing if needed but I'm not sure what I should focus on removing/disavowing. Really bad sites with only one or two links? Sites that have a lot of links to the site? Sites with keyword stuffy anchor text? Any help on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fuel0 -
Disavowal & Reconsideration request - Can I do one without the other?
I submitted a link disavowal file for a client a few weeks ago and before doing that I read up on how to properly use the tool. My understanding is that if you received a manual penalty then you need to submit a reconsideration request after cleaning up links. We didn't receive a penalty so I didn't submit one. I'm wondering if anyone has used the tool (not stemming from a penalty) and if you did or didn't submit a recon. request, and what the results were. I've read that if a site is hit algorithmically, then filing a recon request won't help. Should I just do it anyway? Would be great to hear from anyone who has gone through a similar situation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vanessa120 -
How to minimalise links in your footer
Hi guys, I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at. Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website. I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/ and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links. because I do found also some negative comments on this approach http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Letty0 -
Does Google WMT download links button give me all the links they count
Hi Different people are telling me different things I think if I download "all links" using the button in WMT to excel, I am seeing all the links Google is 'counting' when evaluating my site. is that right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Footer sitewide links
Here's a question - does having a "website designed by" reference in the footer of every page of one of your clients help or hurt? I have a major university .edu that I designed a site for one of their departments and it is just about to launch and they've allowed me to put a reference in the footer. I've had pretty good luck with this on my other clients' sites, but didn't know if this practice is seen as spammy. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chas-2957210