To disavow or not?!
-
Hi,
I've been rooting around my GWT account and noticed two what may be dodgy links, they look like a blog network - no contact details on the site and basically just blog posts about various subjects that all contain keyword rich links.
The two that are pointing at me are two seperate articles on two sites that both contain around 3 keyword links to our website.
I have no idea why these are linking to me as I have not requested them, so not too sure if someone has done this on purpose on what! Looked on the sites in question and there is no way of contacting the person responsible for the sites.
Not had any warnings yet (touch wood) in GWT, how you you go about trying to get shut of links when there is no contact info on the sites?
Bit wary of using the Disavow thing in Google as some people say go for it while others say avoid?
Any hints/tips would be welcomed as this has got me a bit worried!
Cheers
Ted
-
Hi Ted,
If you have dodgy links seen from GWT which you suspect as part of a blog network, you might as well further investigate it using other tools like OSE, MajesticSEO, Ahrefs or LRT in order to assure you that only 2 dodgy links are pointing to you. GWT in most cases won't tell you the complete picture of your link profile.
Of course, 2 dodgy links won't hurt you but it won't hurt you either to use the Disavow Tool when you see incoming spammy links en masse. Being proactive using it is fine IMHO. Why? I would not want to be hit first and lose revenue along the way. By experience, bringing back a site from penalty takes time. Dropped traffic over a period of time is tantamount to revenue loss.
-
Two spammy links are not going to hurt your site at all. I would ignore these and move on.
I run a fair sized information site that gets links like this all the time. I have no idea why but I am not about to spend time trying to remove them.
-
The general consensus in this area is to leave using the disavow tool unless Google have sent you a notice regarding your linking profile.
However, Penguin is an algo, which can penalise people for their linking profiles and in this case no email gets sent out. I think this question highlights the fear that if you all of a sudden get these "bad" links or have them in your profile then you might be penalised and not know why. Because everyone runs around saying "only do it if Google told you to" then you avoid using the disavow tool and Penguin continues to own you.
So in essence, I agree with what people are saying, but there are still a bunch of unknowns here and we shouldn't all just take what Matt Cutts says as gospel (I.E. only us disavow if you've received an email). Google are getting tons of stuff wrong right now (hopefully with some Holy Grail future yet to be shown to us) and things need to become more transparent so things can be fixed.
-
Completely agree with Tom, save your findings in an excel file, which may help you in the near future. Just because if those lnks may be hurting you you'll receive an unnatural link warning or a descrease in traffic. The disavow tool is helpful on removing links in a great scale, not for removing jsut a couple of links each week. Is good to prevent but as Tom said, better to not raise google eyes on your site, a manual review can only spot bad things; I've never seen a manual promotion after a review
-
You and I both, Ted!
It's very annoying I know, but I think we can be a bit optimistic over the matter. If those links are just a one-off and are not replicated en masse, then I'd be pretty confident that Google wouldn't penalise you for it. I'm of the opinion that it would treat the links like an anomaly in the data - an exception to the rule and not indicative of the actual website. It's quite a sophisticated algorithm after all and, despite the flak that they get (definitely from me), Google site reviewers are pretty reasonable folk.
-
Hi Tom,
That was my instinct to be honest, leave it and see what happens as I don't want G to go digging and find anything else that I've not found myself - just wanted a different view
Bit pee'd off really as I 100% did not gain/add these links myself - always steered away from stuff like that
Would also be interested if anyone has had luck using the disavow tool before any penalties or warnings, be handy to know!
Ted
-
Hi Ted
Myself and a few others here are of the mind set that you should only use the disavow tool when prompted by Google. This is when Google sends you an unnatural links warning to your website and asks you to remove these links.
Colour me sceptical, but I feel that if you can avoid opening up to Google on the issue, then you should. Not that you should have anything to hide, but I think there's nothing to be gained by doing so unless you have been requested by Google themselves, and you could potentially be putting yourself on their radar.
If you're traffic and rankings have not severely decreased and there's no visible penalty on your site, then I would leave the links alone. I'd certainly keep a note of them and mention that you cannot contact them because there is no email or contact form (incidentally, have you tried looking at the registrar's data on who.is?). Should anything happen in the future (touch wood it won't) you're ready to rock straight away. There's also a chance that Google has already devalued these links - we've seen evidence that Google is moving towards monthly refreshes in its algorithm to devalue links on the fly (which is a much better solution then a dramatic fall because of a penalty).
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had success in being proactive with the disavow tool (disavowing bad links before a penalty has come, rankings improve), but so far I don't think I've met anyone on the forums that has done so. Would love to be proven wrong, but until then my advice would be to make a note on the domains, but don't disavow. Concentrate instead with the good inbound marketing strategies you've been using so far - I think this is a much better use of your time.
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
-
disavow primary domain?
Hi friends is it possible to disavow primary domain? Like com or net? We currently see many incoming spam links with primary domain .xyz and i just wonder, why not block all these links with one rule domain:xyz? thanks
Link Building | | netcomsia0 -
Results After a Disavow File Submission
Hi, I have a client who had a range of spammy links going to their website. The links were from exact match anchor text, from duplicate content and poor quality, irrelevant domains. They also had built a number of sites and linked to my client's site from each of the footers. All the domains they owned have been redirected to the site we're working on. We also disavowed all the spammy links going to the site. This was over a month ago and rankings haven't changed and in fact, have gone down slightly. Is there any other course of action anybody could suggest or should i wait longer in the hope the disavow is still yet to be accounted for? Any help I'd really, really appreciate! Thanks
Link Building | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Bad Links to New Domain - Do I Disavow?
About 2 months ago a new client of mine bought a domain and we built him a nice new site; however, it appears the previous owner of the domain used some spammy SEO tactics. I've had to redirect about 30 pages and now I've found some spammy links. I've only discovered a few of them, but he doesn't have that many links yet so I'm wondering what kind of impact this will have. Is it worth disavowing a half dozen links? The sites are in Chinese and appear to be unmanaged link farms so getting the webmaster to remove them is unlikely. Also wondering what else is lurking out there that I haven't discovered yet... I suggested to the client we consider a different domain since the site is new, but he's become pretty attached to it. Any ideas?
Link Building | | Dino640 -
Disavow & nofollow from same IP
I'm a web developer, and as such, we run a bank of half a dozen dedicated servers. I have 2 questions with regards to nofollow links There's half a dozen sites linking back to us from the same bank of servers (across 3 different IP's but all in the same facility) because we have donated our web design services and we're a sponsor. It's not a paid link, it's a sponsorship. Should I still nofollow the link? I run a couple of personal blogs on the same bank of servers. There's an absolute tonne of original content and a handful of links back to my shop. Because I own both sites, should I nofollow these links as well? I am doing a massive cleanup before the Penguin pops his head out again.
Link Building | | sparrowdog0 -
Disavow
When we disavow a file with certain domains, and then after a couple of weeks find new domains which have newly arrived in our back-links profile, and again disavow those new domains. So, basically we are over writing the complete file, will Google take this as a complete new file?
Link Building | | usef4u
Or will they have domains stored from previous file, and take these new domains as an addition from the new file submission?0 -
Why does GWT still show some links from a disavowed domain?
We have disavowed a lot of spam links that were pointing to our website. We've disavowed on a domain level and a lot of links have now disappeared on GWT. However, there is a domain that we disavowed where MOST of the links have disappeared in GWT but there are STILL some remaining even a month and a half after disavowing. The disavow file has been sent in numerous times since then with new domains. Is there an explanation as to why some links still remain on this domain even though most of them have been disavowed and removed from GWT?
Link Building | | ResumeGenius0 -
Thoughts on using the disavow tool for removed links?
Our website has been penalized by Google for the past few months due to unnatural links. We have spent the past 2 months submitting link removal requests to the domain owners with success. However, the Google Webmaster Tools "links to site" has not updated the list. I understand that they update the list of links as they crawl the website, but it has been 6-8 weeks on a lot of them (mostly our biggest offenders). We attempted to send a reconsideration request anyways, hoping Google would see that even though it is still listed, the link isn't actually there. We received a response that it is still in violation, but I believe it is because the webmaster tools links have not updated and perhaps this is what they go off of. Would you recommend submitting these domains to the disavow tool even though our link has already been removed for the past 6-8 weeks? Or even just listing them with the "#" comment tag so they can see they had been removed? Or would you continue waiting for it to update? Of course, we would like the penalty removed as soon as possible and were concerned that the list hadn't removed these websites the past 6-8 weeks our link had been removed. Example: This domain shows we have 3,397 within this website. It was an affiliate that had this URL forwarding to our pages: http://www.binet.lv/go.pl?PID=49276714O2422 . This no longer forwards to our webpage and the affiliate has been expired, but the GWT still shows them at the top of the links list. I also noticed a lot of sites left the links up, but added the nofollow attribute. These are still coming up in the Links list and does not decipher between which do and do not have nofollow. Could the spammy sites with our links as nofollow still be hurting us? Thanks for any help and recommendations!
Link Building | | shopbloc0 -
Disavow Anchor and EMD
Lets say you have an legitimate EMD for a domain that is a ecommerce site with reasonable content. The site traffic was cut in half by Penguin. You think one of the main reasons that you were hit is old SEO black hat link building with Anchor that is exact match.....The catch 22 an exact match achor is the EMD. I want to disavow some of these old black hat backlinks and obviously I will nuke the ones from the spammy sites first and see what happens. What about the backlinks that have achor of emd.com (the company name and as it so happens a valid EMD) or just EMD. If the hit is coming from every single link becuase they are all exact match becuase that is the proper legit match and not some attempt to game the system......What the heck do you do? I get the War on spammy EMDs but I hope the legit ones are not hit even more. For one thing google should just have this ironic creteria for excluding EMDs....if they are running AdWords....they are 95% spam sites.....I love the irony of that one. I am betting lots of these mange to still get listed.
Link Building | | freestone0