Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed.
They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking.
Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)?
Thanks,
Cole
-
I'm working on a site that had a very poor disavow file in place from a previous agency. I went through the link profile with a fine tooth comb and added a bunch more domains to the file. Organic traffic has gone up over 80%.
That is not our only problem and there are other factors to work on but the cleansing is reassuring even though we know the profile is pretty thin. But again that just goes to show quality always wins over quantity.
I would say there may be a whole host of issues hampering ranking but a dirty profile is a must fix, no matter the immediate outcome. I explain to clients that I anticipate a short term fall and why to set their expectations, then anything positive is a great bonus.
-
We were under penalty for certain keywords as a result of a poor link building strategy in the past. This led us to have to use the disavow tool in a fairly broad manner. The results were pretty inconclusive though, while we certainly saw some of the keywords recover as a result, this was not in the manner that they were at before penalty and we saw the most dramatic effect on the long tail keywords.
There were instances of shorter keywords improving, though this was fairly minimal. What I would say though is that it is still better to disavow those spammy backlinks now than suffer in the long term as a result and even if there is no improvement I would not necessarily expect to see a drop as a result.
Tim
-
Very good question and this has been covered in this great moz article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
Will it help, maybe not in the short term - but if you do nothing you are running the risks of being penalised further down the line and losing all your rankings. Thats the worse case, the best case is by removing the old links your rankings increase. I would never really leave bad links, as you will always be looking over your shoulder waiting for Google to strike.
Remove them and then concentrate on getting some quality links to your site to help boost rankings.
With Google you can never really predict anything any more and you won't really know the outcome till you have removed the bad links.
Worse case: you remove the bad links and your rankings don't improve - but your no longer looking over your shoulder waiting to see if you have been hit by the next update.
Best case: You suddenly jump up in the rankings and you no longer care about the next update, you actually look forward to them, to see which off your competition has been hit.
You will probably get neither of these by removing them, you will probably see a little improvement but nothing massive and you won't have to look over your shoulder.
I know I haven't really answered your question - but even if Google was to answer this question, they would only be guessing as they can't 100% accurately say what will happen as its all machine learnt.
Andy
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 many links can you have on sitemap.html
we have a lot of pages that we want to create crawlable paths to. How many links are able to be crawled on 1 page for sitemap.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
Screaming Frog tool left me stumped
Hi there again, I found a major cloaking hack in our client's website that is really well camouflaged and all the seo tools that I tried to help me check for cloaking couldn't find it. I know that screaming frog is a great tool and I want to use it to help me, however, I can't seem to get my way around their system that I downloaded. Can you help me with the screaming frog program? Do you know where I can make a full site check for cloaking, maybe there are more links that I wasn't notified about? I would really appreciate if you could help me with that. Thanks so much, Ruchy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ruchy2 -
Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?
Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Does type of hosting affect SEO rankings?
Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uworlds
Mark0 -
Disavow links leading to 404
Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text. These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Disavow wn.com?
I am cleaning up some spammy backlinks for a client and will be submitting a disavow at Google. This particular company website has 2,000+ backlinks from the domain wn.com which appears to be "World News". If you go to it, it appears to be nothing more than scraped content from other sites. Here is a recent example, where my client is linked to (I don't even see the backlink on the page, but it is in the source code!):
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gbkevin
http://article.wn.com/view/2013/11/22/Hungarian_Woman_Sentenced_to_One_Year_in_Prison_for_Her_Role/#/related_news But when I look at Moz metrics, WN.com has a domain authority of 90! So I don't want to disavow something that could POTENTIALLY be helping us. The client's website gets zero traffic from wn.com and I've never seen my client linked to in anything worthwhile... it kinda looks spammy to me. If you were me, after looking at WN.com and taking everything into account... would you disavow it? This client really needs to create a healthier backlink profile. Thanks!0 -
Can one business operate under more than one website?
Is it possible for a business to rank organically for the same keyword multiple times with different web addresses? Say if I sell car keys and I wanted to rank for "buy new car keys" and I set up two different website say ibuycarkeys.com and carkeycity.com and then operate under both of these, would Google frown upon this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve2150 -
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin11