Is it good practice to update your disavow file after a penalty is removed.
-
I was wondering if you could use the disavow file by adding to it - even after your site has recovered from a partial site penalty.
As a recurring SEO procedure, we are always looking at links pointing to our Website. We then ascertain those links that are clearly of no value. In order to clean these up, would it be good practice to update your disavow file with more of theses domains.
Is the disavow file just used for penalty issues to alert google of the work you have done? (we have had penalty in the past but fine now)
Would this method help in keeping high quality links to the fore and therefore removing low quality links from Googles eyes?
I would welcome your comments.
-
Thanks -really good advice
-
Sounds good. When it comes to deciding on disavow vs removal, if you have no manual penalty, then my advice is to remove any links you actively control and then disavow the rest.
Here's more info:
-
HI Marie and thanks for your response.
Our penalty recovered about 7 months ago and we have seen a gradual increase in rankings.
However I keep finding unnatural links appearing and there are no contact details associated with these sites.
I had set in place a regular procedure to check out what's happening link-wise and I think its good practise to somehow remove these links. We can't manually get rid of them so to disavow was our next logical step. it keeps things clean but I wasn't sure if it would be shaking the Google tree!!
I will download the file and update with new spam sites.
-
In addendum to my response....
I would take pretty much anything MarieHaynes says as The Word when it come to anything relating to disavowing. She is the resident queen when it comes to penalties. She assisted me early on with some of my struggles and happens to know a lot more about this stuff than me!
-
Yes!
In almost every site for which I have removed a penalty, we keep seeing unnatural links that appear over time. Some of them may be the result of old automated link building tactics that are still replicating. Some may be negative SEO. And I think many of them are old links that just couldn't be found by the link checking tools until now.
You will likely want to do monthly disavows for some time until you start seeing that no new unnatural links are appearing.
Keep in mind that when you update your disavow you are overwriting your current file, so you need to download your file, convert it to .txt, add on to it, and then reupload it.
-
Good Morning!
The disavow tool, is a very powerful tool, and one that should, in my opinion, be used with caution. Google even hands out a warning before doing anything.
The strictly state that it should be used as a last ditch effort. My personal opinion is to only use it as that, last case scenario. If there are links that are just low-quality and not necessarily associated with your website, I personally wouldn't use the disavow.
There is no such thing as a link with no value, look at the site it's coming from, and the page it's going to. Is there anyway you could leverage potential traffic from that page?
If the links are 100% spam, and are causing you to be concerned, then I think that warrants uploading to the disavow tool.
Use the tool with caution my friend.
Hope that 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
-
Using 2 cache plugin good or not?
Hi, Can anyone tell me - whether using 2 cache plugin helps or it cause any issue? Besides, when i used w3 cache plugin in WordPress its found like inline CSS issue to get cleared. So, i tried auto optimized but my website Soc prollect gone crashed in between while using the some. Is there any solution and can anyone tell me which plugin advantages to speed the site by removing java script and inline css at a time.
Technical SEO | | nazfazy0 -
Is it important to include image files in your sitemap?
I run an ecommerce business that has over 4000 product pages which, as you can imagine, branches off into thousands of image files. Is it necessary to include those in my sitemap for faster indexing? Thanks for you help! -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Should I use canonicals? Best practice?
Hi there, I've been working on a pretty dated site. The product pages have tabs that separate the product information, e.g., a tab for specifications, a tab for system essentials, an overview tab that is actually just a copy of the product page. Each tab is actually a link to a completely separate page, so product/main-page is split into product/main-page/specs, product/main-page/resources, etc. Wondering if canonicals would be appropriate in this situation? The information isn't necessarily duplicate (except for the overview tabs) but with each tab as a separate page, I would imagine that's diluting the value of the main page? The information all belongs to the main page, shouldn't it be saying "I'm a version of the main page"?
Technical SEO | | anneoaks0 -
Canonical in head best practice
Hi Is putting a list of canonical no follow links in the head the best practice? From SEO Moz analysis urls of duplicate content was flagged but now I have lots of cononicals in the head of my doc and the code looks untidy see head here : http://carpetflooringsdirect.com/ Is there a cleaner way of doing this? and how do I retest to see if I have fixed? Many thanks Matt
Technical SEO | | Matt-J0 -
January 2013 Google update affected my projects ?
I am running 400+ projects. Mostly all projects keyword rank has been effected recently. IS there any new update from google between 10-19 January 2013 ?
Technical SEO | | deepakwadhwa0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
Business Site Hit Hard from The Penguin Update
Over the last week or so I have been swimming through all the forum posts regarding the latest google penguin update and I am still unclear as to why my site was hit so hard. I have lost 90% of my traffic and my target keywords have disappeared. Maybe I am missing something hear but if you could have a look at my site in question here : http://www.websitetemplatedesign.com/ Is there something that just stands out that I have missed as to why this site would have been hit so hard? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmccommas1 -
Google penalty
Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?
Technical SEO | | phatride0