Disavow post Penguin update
-
As recent Penguin update makes quick move with backlinks with immediate impact; does Disavow tool also results the changes in few days rather than weeks like earlier? How long does it take now to see the impact of disavow? And I think still we must Disavow some links even Google claim that it'll take care of bad backlinks without passing value from them?
-
Hi Marie,
Thanks for such detailed answer.
Actually I have recently disavow a website from which 74 links are pointing to our website. So that domain must be crawled post my disavow for the impact. Right?
I wanna share our experience with related to back-links. Our global website has visitors around the globe. We been inversely ranking in India and US when we reclaimed and removed links from few domains. In more detail: We dropped in India and Improved our ranking in US when we reclaimed some back links and we dropped in US and improved in India while we removed those redirects. So it clearly mean that one or few links can trigger the algorithm that our ranking fluctuated for more than 15 positions. So such few or more suspicious back-links might be pushing us down. In this scenario, we can use Disavow undoubtedly if we know such links. We never received any manual action but not sure about manual penalty or silent penalty, but definitely we dropped post recent Penguin update where some of the back-links are real culprits. Hope I shared some useful information to you.
Thanks,
Satish
-
I don't think that anything has changed in how quickly the disavow tool works. If you put a domain or url in your disavow file, the next time Google crawls that page, they'll stop counting the link equity and the link signals that used to point to your site.
In the past, the reason why Penguin took so long to recover from is because the Penguin algorithm itself needed to be rerun in order for you to see the effects. What's changed now is that the algorithm is running in real time. So, as Google crawls the web, they do their Penguin magic.
I'm seeing a lot of people asking why they're not seeing any effects from disavowing and I think people are missing the point. The new Penguin algorithm devalues bad links but doesn't put a demotion on the site as it used to do. Disavowing a link essentially adds an invisible nofollow to the link. As such, disavowing a link that Google has already devalued is not going to help your site improve.
So why disavow at all? There are still some reasons to do so:
-
If you've got a lot of unnatural links that are not disavowed then you could be at risk for getting a manual unnatural links penalty. You do not want to risk that.
-
There could potentially be other algorithms that take links into account.
-
While we have been told that Penguin devalues rather than demotes...should we take Google's word on that? Some people are disavowing just to be sure.
Hope that helps,
Marie
-
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
-
Call for Help. Hit Badly with "Medic" and another 30% Loss with Sept 28th Update
Hi Everyone, I am not sure how this is all happening. We have been online for about 15 years, and now we are at our lowest amount of traffic in about 10 years. Our sites are www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com. We sell commodity items, but I have focused on unique product descriptions, tons of UGC, blog posts and guides for awhile now and it has always done us well. Until as of late. This is what I feel led up to this, but I am hoping there is something I missed. May 1st, 2018: Migrated www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com from Shopify. Similar sites, but almost all unique content. We purchased www.mysupplementstore.com about 8 years ago. A ton of traffic and sales, which is why we didn't just redirect it. Around May 25th: www.mysupplementstore.com took a big hit and lost almost 40% of its traffic. Nothing happened to www.bestpricenutrition.com, we actually increased traffic. Aug 1st Update: www.mysupplementstore.com lost another 25% of its traffic. www.bestpricenutrition.com lost about 40% of it's traffic. Sept 28th: Nothing happened to www.mysupplementstore.com, but www.bestpricenutrition.com lost another 30% of it's traffic. So I have been trying to figure out if there is anything technically wrong, but doesn't seem so. These are issues we discovered in August. During the migration, the reviews from each site were syndicated to both websites. There were 1000's. This was resolved in mid August. During the migration, the company doing the migration pushed our blog posts to both websites. 100's of blog posts duplicated to each website. This was resolved mid August. We found that a disgruntled employee instead writing unique content for our product pages, she was copying them one from another. This was about 100 product pages, which we have since resolved. What's Left I noticed on www.bestpricenutrition.com that we have 100's of blog posts that are getting hardly any traffic. I had trimmed www.mysupplementstore.com of this low traffic content. I am working on www.bestpricenutrition.com still. I have been in this industry since 2003, survived 2012, but have exhausted everything I know to figure this out. It's another sob story I know, but trying to keep everyone's job alive here, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
Website Snippet Update in Search Console?
I have a company that I started working with that has an outdated and inaccurate snippet coming up. See the link below. They changed their name from DK on Pittsburgh Sports to just DK Pittsburgh Sports several years ago, but the snippet is still putting the old info, including outdated and incorrect description. I'm not seeing that title or description anywhere on the site or a schema plugin. How can we get it updated? I have updated titles, etc. for the home page, and done a Fetch to get re-indexed. Does Snippet have a different type of refresh that I can submit or edit? Thanks in advance https://g.co/kgs/qZAnAC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?
We have added very little new website content in the last year. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week help improve our ranking in Google? A few years ago adding new content would've had quickly had a positive effect. Is that still the case? Or should we focus content creation resources in other areas such as social media? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Phantom 3 Update?
My site got demolished by this update and I really don't know why and would appreciate if any Mozzers could help me out to understand this. I just found out about this update that happened today and I am kind of shocked and at a loss on what happened. If someone would PM me, I would really appreciate it Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve450580 -
Questions on Google Penguin Clean-up Strategy
Hello Moz Community! I was hit with a REAL bad penalty in May 2013, and the date corresponds to Penguin #4. Never received a manual spam action, but the 50% drop in traffic was very apparent. Since then, I've had a slow reduction in traffic, to where I am today... which is almost baseline. Increases in traffic have not occurred regardless of efforts. In researching a little more, I see that my old SEO companies built my links with exact keyterm matches, many of them repeated over and over, verbatim, on different sites. I've heard two pieces of advice that I don't like 1) scrap the site, or 2) disavow all the links. I would rather see if I can get the webmasters to change the link to something generic, or my brand name, before I do either of these. To scrap my site and start new will be damn near impossible because I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and my site has age (since 2007), so rather work with what I have. A couple of questions, for folks who are in the know about this penalty, if I may: This penguin update, #4, on May 22nd, was it ONLY because of the link text? Or was it also because of the link quality? None of the updates before it harmed me, and I believe those were because of the quality? Could it be for links linking from my blog to my site? My blog (ex. www.mysite.com/blog), has close to 1,000 blog posts, and back in the days I would write these really long, keyword stuffed links leading to www.mysite.com. I've been in the process of cleaning these up, and shortening them, and changing them to more generic (click here's), but it is a LONG and painstaking process. If I get webmasters to change text to just the url or brand name, that's better than disavowing, correct? As long the linking site has a decent spam score and PA/DA on OSE? Is having SOME exact anchor text okay on these links? Is it just the abuse that's the problem? If so, how many should I leave? (like 5 max per keyword?) Or should I just change to the url, or disavow altogether, any and all links that have exact keyword matches? I've downloaded my link profile from OSE and Majestic, and will do so from Ahrefs (I believe it is)? Does Webmaster Tools have any section that can help give me insights into the issue? If so, can you point me in the right direction? Can I get partial credit, for some work done? For instance, say a major update, or crawl, happens, and I've only fixed/disavowed 25% percent of the links by then, is there a possibility that I get a small boost in traffic? Or am I in the doghouse till they are all fixed? Say I clean/disavow everything up, will my improvement be seen in the next crawl? Or the next Penguin update? As there may be a substantial difference in time there. 😎 I see AHREFS, has some information on anchor text... any rules of thumb as to percentages of use of a certain anchor text, to see if I'm abusing or not, before I start undertaking all of this? Thanks! Could the penalty have "passed" altogether, and this is just where I rank? Thanks guys, but the last thing I want to do is ditch my site... I will work hard on this, but need some guidance. Much appreciated! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidC.0 -
Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com Hello Mozers, I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site? In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines. In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side. Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iderma
Adam Paddock0 -
Should I Remove Dates From My Old Posts
I have a web site that has content about home improvement topics but the site has no new content since 2010. All the posts on the wordpress site have the date which are all 2010 and prior. Is there a downside in terms of search engine rankings to remove the dates or changing the dates? What are the risks to removing the dates? Could I lose rankings if I do this? Do you have any personal experience with this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alpha170