Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
-
Hello,
I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links.
I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000!
Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000.
This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
-
Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.
-
I would disavow the blogspot subdomains individually. So you'd have 1000 lines that say:
domain:subdomain-name.blogspot.com
The documentation for the disavow tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html) says the following:
Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.What we don't know, however, is if we can do a disavow:blogspot.com to get everything from blogspot. I wouldn't trust it to do this and I would definitely disavow each individual subdomain.
If you don't have a manual penalty then there is no way to upload anything other than your disavow file to Google. Your disavow file is not read by a human. It is machine processed. You simply need to trust that you have done a thorough job and then, when Penguin refreshes, if you've got a good base of good links you should see an improvement.
-
I remember G saying that you should include links you've removed in disavow as well. You can add a comment before you list all the removed links but I don't think G manually reads disavow files anyways.
Since it's algorithmic, you just need to disavow/remove all those sitewide footer links and fix your anchor profile. Check out this case study as it is very similar to your situation.
-
In my opinion, if you are going to use the main domain that is blogspot.com it will probably disavow any link that is coming from blogspot.com which means if later down the list if you get a good link from the blogspot, even it will not give you any help!
In my case, I used the sub-domains and it worked fine for me!
Hope this helps!
-
We didn't receive a penalty letter, but our traffic and search queries impression went down when there was an algorithm update with footer links.
I don't have the original list of subdomains that removed our footer links, is it really necessary for Google? I mean, can't they realize that there aren't SO MANY links coming from Blogspot anymore? And is there a section in disavow links where i can upload a list of removed links i can show Google? Or do i just state that I removed so many with a list of the subdomains in a written notice when doing a disavow (never done a disavow, so this is new to me).
THis problem won't continue either because we stopped our partnership with the blog template devloper, so anything after 2 years ago and on...we are not a part of new consumer blogs.
Looking forward to your reply and other suggestions.
-
I'm assuming you received a manual penalty letter.
I would do the separate subdomains (if this is a complete list and new ones aren't being created) since it shows more effort and won't discredit any links you get from legit .blogspot blogs. Be sure to include the domains you've successfully removed in your disavow file as well.
If this is a problem that will continue (more people will create new sites with your footer link), you might have to disavow the whole domain.
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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Subdomain optimization - advices
Hi, I need some specific advices on which is the best way to optimize the subdomain of a main domain. Besides meta title, description, etc. Br.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar0 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
No Google Ranking..yet
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design? If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction. We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page. http://thatworksdesign.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bvrettski0 -
First attempt at manual penalty removal fails - all example links provided by Google not in Majestic, GWT, Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OSE.
Hello all, I am trying to recover a site from a manual penalty. I already submitted once. Here's what we did. We took the link profile from webmaster tools, majestic seo, ahrefs, link detox, and ose. We manually looked at every link to exclude good links. Then used a tool to run the removal campaign. Submitted a disavow file and reconsideration request. Google came back with a denial. When I looked at the three example links that Google provided, they were definitely spammy (forum profile and comment spam). But none of them were in any of the original csv downloads from GWT, Ahrefs, Majestic, OSE, or LinkDetox. What can I do? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicoleDeLeon0 -
Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
Hi there! I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now. In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly : http://{some-city}.duproprio.com This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords. But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains... Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority? Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic? Thanks a big lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DuProprio.com0 -
Does Google count links on a page or destination URLs?
Google advises that sites should have no more than around 100 links per page. I realise there is some flexibility around this which is highlighted in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru One of Google's justifications for this guideline is that a page with several hundred links is likely to be less useful to a user. However, these days web pages are rarely 2 dimensional and usually include CSS drop--down navigation and tabs to different layers so that even though a user may only see 60 or so links, the source code actually contains hundreds of links. I.e., the page is actually very useful to a user. I think there is a concern amongst SEO's that if there are more than 100ish links on a page search engines may not follow links beyond those which may lead to indexing problems. This is a long winded way of getting round to my question which is, if there are 200 links in a page but many of these links point to the same page URL (let's say half the links are simply second ocurrences of other links on the page), will Google count 200 links on the page or 100?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SureFire0