On the use of Disavow tool / Have I done it correctly, or what's wrong with my perception?
-
On a site I used GSA search engine ranker. Now, I got good links out of it. But, also got 4900 links from one domain. And, I thought according to ahrefs. One link from the one domain is equal to 4900 links from one domain. So, I downloaded links those 4900 and added 4899 links to disavow tool. To disavow, to keep my site stable at rankings and safe from any future penalty. Is that a correct way to try disavow tool? The site rankings are as it is.
-
Highland's analysis is correct. You should only be using the disavow tool carefully and with a measured approach, and usually in dealing with penalties.
-
Wait, you just saw a bunch of links and disavowed them because... you saw a bunch of links? Did you have any penalties or rank drops? Anything that would lead you to believe these links are actively harming your rankings?
Disavow is a cleanup tool, not a preventative tool. I mean, there's a really good reason why they tell you NOT to use this tool lightly. If i could put this on a giant neon sign I would, but here's what Google says on their help page (emphasis mine)
This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.
If I were you, I'd yank the disavow out right now
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
-
Changing Links to Spans with Robots.txt Blocked Redirects using Linkify/jQuery
Hi, I was recently penalized most likely because Google started following javascript links to bad neighborhoods that were not no-followed. The first thing I did was remove the Linkify plugin from my site so that all those links would disappear, but now I think I have a solution that works with Linkify without creating crawlable links. I did the following: I blocked access to the Linkify scripts using robots.txt so that Google won't execute the scripts that create the links. This has worked for me in the past with banner ads linking to other sites of mine. At least it appears to work because those sites did not get links from pages running those banners in search console. I created a /redirect/ directory that redirects all offsite URLs. I put a robots.txt block on this directory. I configured the Linkify plugin to parse URLs into span elements instead of a elements and add no follow attributes. They still have an href attribute, but the URLs in the href now point to the redirect directory and the span onclick event redirects the user. I have implemented this solution on another site of mine and I am hoping this will make it impossible for Google to categorize my pages as liking to any neighborhoods good or bad. Most of the content is UGC, so this should discourage link spam while giving users clickable URLs and still letting people post complaints about people that have profiles on adult websites. Here is a page where the solution has been implemented https://cyberbullyingreport.com/bully/predators-watch-owner-scott-breitenstein-of-dayton-ohio-5463.aspx, the Linkify plugin can be found at https://soapbox.github.io/linkifyjs/, and the custom jQuery is as follows: jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { 2 $('p').linkify({ tagName: 'span', attributes: { rel: 'nofollow' }, formatHref: function (href) { href = 'https://cyberbullyingreport.com/redirect/?url=' + href; return href; }, events:{ click: function (e) { var href = $(this).attr('href'); window.location.href = href; } } }); 3 });
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | STDCarriers0 -
How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?
I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _nitman0 -
Should I disavow this Link?
I am trying to clean up my link profile to get rid of a partial penalty and am not sure to do with one of the links to my site http://www.seoco.co.uk The link is 100% organic and has come from a foreign language site that published an infographic that I did: http://www.clasesdeperiodismo.com/2012/12/23/la-evolucion-de-las-redes-sociales-este-ano-en-una-infografia/ The thing is that in the link to my homepage they have used the anchor text SEO as opposed to my company name. I have already sent them an email and asked them to change the anchor text but they haven't responded so I am guessing they probably wouldn't respond to a removal request either. Should I disavow it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy0 -
Should I Disavow More Links
My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links. A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150. During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time: "Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines" After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well. I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day. Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere. This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links. Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up? By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy1 -
Potential Implications of using the Disavow tool to remove thousands of links
So here's the situation. My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production. Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas. My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info? Is it legit? It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads??? I thought Google was against link farms... 2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences? -Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mjmorse0 -
So what's up with UpDowner.com?
I've noticed these guys in link profiles for several sites I manage. They'll usually show up around 1,000-10,000 times in the backlink profile. From what I can tell they index websites, build up keyword relationships, and then when you search for something on their site (e.g. poker) they'll present a list of related sites with stats about them. The stats seem to be yanked straight from Alexa. Where the backlink comes from is that every time 'your' site shows up for a search result they'll put a little iframe that contains your site. This means if your site's name/keywords are pretty broad, you could be showing up thousands and tens of thousands of times as being linked from these guys on their pages that Google indexes. And Google indexes, boy do they ever. At the height, they had over 53 million pages indexed. That has apparently shrunk now to around 25 million. I believe their strategy is to generate a crap-load of automated content in the hopes they can cash in on obscure long tails. So my questions for you guys are: Are you seeing them in your backlinks too? Should I block their spider/referrers? What is their deal man?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icecarats0 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Improve CTR with Special Characters in Meta-Description / Title Tags
I've seen this question asked a few times, but I haven't found a definitive answer. I'm quite surprised no one from Google has addressed the question specifically. I ran across this post the other day and it piqued my interest: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/13/special-characters-in-meta-descriptions-the-beboisation-of-google/ If you're able to make your result stand out by using stars, smiley faces, TM symbols, etc it would be a big advantage. This is in use currently if you search for a popular mattress keyword in Google. It really is amazing how the special characters draw your attention to the title. You can also see the TM and Copyright symbols if you search for "Logitech Revue" Radioshack is using these characters in their adwords also. Has anyone found any definitive answers to this? Has anyone tracked CTR and long-term results with special characters in title or description tags? Any chance of getting penalized for using this? As a follow-up, it looks like you could also put check symbols into your meta-description tags. That has all kinds of interesting possibilities. http://www.seosmarty.com/special-symbols-wingdings-for-social-media-branding-twitter-linkedin-google-plus/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseninja0