Disavow a big part of my external link profile
-
Hi There,
With the latest penguin 3.0 algorithm update (on October 17th,) I noticed a drop in my rankings. Even though I didn’t receive any manual penalty because no messages have been found in WebMaster Tool, I suspect it is an algorithm penalty. For this reason, I definitively decided to clean-up my external link profile. **I am excluding it is a Panda 4.1 penalty because an extensive site structure review has been conducted quite recently.
I collected external links from Webmaster Tool and Open Site Explorer.
What I found is that 83% of my external links need to be disavowed because the links come either from poor directories or marketing articles that are evidently and specifically written for link building purposes.
My questions are:
1) Shall an external link clean-up be set in place anyway although I didn’t receive any penalty message in order to prevent future problems with penguin algorithm?
2) Is it too dangerous to disavow 83% of external links? May such a manoeuvre destroy my actual rankings?
Thanks in advance for you advices
-
-
Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing
-
It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.
-
-
Thanks a lot for your answer!! Very helpful
Another couple of questions if you don't mind J
-
Do you recommend to get new and healthy links before disavowing or go straight with the "cleansing"?
-
I read that before disavowing I should ask the web page owners to remove (nofollow) the bad link pointing at my site. I find such a procedure not only tedious but also quite useless because we all know that just a very small amount of the site owners would actually complete the task. Shall I in any case follow the process or I might directly disavow?
-
-
-
Yes - clean now before you're penalized again
-
I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.
Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.
-
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
-
How not to lose internal link juice?
Hi, I just added some photography content to my site to showcase my skills, specifically 360 virtual tours. I first tried to have those on regular pages and have the 360s in responsive iframes, but it caused usability problems. So I've chosen instead to have a master page with thumbnails that lead to individuals 360's. https://gregmoinephotography.com/360-virtual-tours-hdr-vr-ready/ Links look like that: http://gregmoinephotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/360/maverick-helicopters/ Each pano takes over the whole page. My concern is losing internal link juice as each pano page doesn't link anywhere. Also, external link juice when people start linking to each 360. What should I do to fix that? Should I just link back to the master page in the body & noscript area, even though content won't be visible? Fine with Google? Lack of content problem? Thank you for reading, and for your help!
Technical SEO | | GregMoine0 -
Link building with AddThis URL
We've begun using AddThis for tracking our social sharing. AddThis has been adding the snippet to the end of the URLs on our pages and we've been finding that people linking to us are linking to the URL with the snippet. AddThis says this isn't a problem for SEO. Is this correct? Here is an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/how-to-start-a-non-profit-organization-in-colorado.php#.UunCfPldVig I want to make sure this is not affecting our SEO in any way, particularly that Google would see this as an affiliate or paid link since it has the "#". I may be crazy but I just want to make sure!
Technical SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Linking to AND canonicalizing to a page?
I am using cross domain rel=canonical to a page that is very similar to mine. I feel the page adds value to my site so I want users to go to it, but I ultimately want them to go to the page I'm canonicalizing to. So I am linking to that page as well. Anyone foresee any issues with doing this? And/or have other suggestions? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Toxic Link Removal
Greetings Moz Community: Recently I received an site audit from a MOZ certified SEO firm. The audit concluded that technically the site did not have major problems (unique content, good architecture). But the audit identified a high number of toxic links. Out of 1,300 links approximately 40% were classified as suspicious, 55% as toxic and 5% as healthy. After identifying the specific toxic links, the SEO firm wants to make a Google disavow request, then manually request that the links be removed, and then make final disavow request of Google for the removal of remaining bad links. They believe that they can get about 60% of the bad links removed. Only after the removal process is complete do they think it would be appropriate to start building new links. Is there a risk that this strategy will result in a drop of traffic with so many links removed (even if they are bad)? For me (and I am a novice) it would seem more prudent to build links at the same time that toxic links are being removed. According to the SEO firm, the value of the new links in the eyes of Google would be reduced if there were many toxic links to the site; that this approach would be a waste of resources. While I want to move forward efficiently I absolutely want to avoid a risk of a drop of traffic. I might add that I have not received any messages from Google regarding bad links. But my firm did engage in link building in several instances and our traffic did drop after the Penguin update of April 2012. Also, is there value in having a professional SEO firm remove the links and build new ones? Or is this something I can do on my own? I like the idea of having a pro take care of this, but the costs (Audit, coding, design, content strategy, local SEO, link removal, link building, copywriting) are really adding up. Any thoughts??? THANKS,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Webmaster internal links issue
Hi All, In webmaster > Internal links https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/internal-links?hl=en&siteUrl= I get counts as in the image http://imgur.com/9bO5H0f is this logical and ok or should i work on finding why so many links and reduce them? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Too Many On-Page Links on a Blog
I have a question about the number of on-page links on a page and the implications on how we're viewed by search engines. After SEOmoz crawls our website, we consistently get notifications that some of our pages have "Too Many On-Page Links." These are always limited to pages on our blog, and largely a function of our tag cloud (~ 30 links) plus categories (10 links) plus popular posts (5 links). These all display on every blog post in the sidebar. How significant a problem is this? And, if you think it is a significant problem, what would you suggest to remedy the problem? Here's a link to our blog in case it helps: http://wiredimpact.com/blog/ The above page currently is listed as having 138 links. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks so much. David
Technical SEO | | WiredImpact0 -
Too many links on my site
Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
Internal Linking: Site-wide VS Content Links
I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit. I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links. My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0