Not sure if I should disavow these links or not

[Jonathan_Murrell]

I am on the marketing team for CandyGalaxy.com we are an online candy store that specializes in bulk candy for events.  Were just about a year and a half old and i'm running into some SEO strategy road blocks lately.  When we started the company we used an oversee's seo company.  For the first few months results were great then things took a massive dive as google began rolling out updates early and mid last year.  After that point we started taking things in house and have been trying to create content and begin content marketing.  We launched a blog @ blog.candygalaxy.com and also launched and educational resource at candybuffet101.com -

However the question i'm up against now is what to do with those bad old links?  Are they actually hurting us?  Or just neutral?

I'm also trying to decided what to do about the links in my footer?  We put those there because those are truly our most popular products and we wanted customers to have easy access, but are those links potentially harmful?

I'm questioning these issues because I feel like there is something holding back some of my pages from ranking.  For example "blue candy" is a very popular section of our website. We have worked on a lot of content for the blog related to blue candy, made videos, photo shoots ect.  We have customer reviews on page and unique category content.  According to open site explorer our DA and PA are around the range of most of the sites in the 8-12 serp position.  But we have more social activity then all but the top 2-3 spots.  However the page almost impossible to find via search.  Its not in the first 300 results and surely the page is more relevant then an entry about quilts.. Similar situations like this have led me to think that maybe there is a technical underlying issues that I have not addressed.  ?  The content is definitely there because if i type in a line from the content directly to google it is the first result.  So the site seems indexed properly..

Would love to hear any feedback from similar experiences or ideas.

Thanks!

[Carson-Ward]

No, don't nofollow internal links, especially for pages you want to rank. That doesn't work well anymore, and will ultimately hurt you.

I see about 190 links in the primary nav. Can those all really be equally important to users and search engines? I'd be really surprised if scrolling through a list of brands hunting for the right one is the best user experience. Don't take my word for it: run some tests and see how people respond to a simplified menus along the top or side. Generally we want to pick a few terms (e.g. brands or candies) to prioritize, and otherwise work on a hierarchy/nav that users intuitively understand.

[Jonathan_Murrell]

Hi Carson,

Thanks for taking the time to really respond to this!  I really appreciate it.

The problem i've run into consistently is that the Nav menu's were not meant for excessive links, but were designed so that customers could legitimately navigate through the site fully from just the first page.  But perhaps that goal is to ambitious for 2000 products.  We've also implemented a script that is supposed to be taking those links off of the home page and effectively hiding them, but maybe thats no longer working properly....

As far as the "site wide" footer links, those also were initially intended for navigation as well?  Would reducing them to no follow be sufficient?  Or potentially just fully removing them be better?

I also took that advice on the internal linked and connected those two pages!

Thanks again for your time and insight

[Carson-Ward]

When it comes to links, the advice you've received is pretty good: it's all about the ratios. If many of your links are spammy with exact-match anchor text, it's possible that they're hurting you. A warning in Google's Webmaster Tools would confirm it, but I think it's fairly likely that you're being affected by Penguin. I see an awfully high number of links with anchor text that is overly-targeted.

I'd start by trying to remove the worst site-wide anchor text links, and then disavow if that doesn't work. At the same time, it will probably help more to think of ways to generate legitimate visibility and interest.

I don't see tons of legitimate links pointing to the site right now. Even if Google is just ignoring the links now and not counting them against you, I wouldn't expect the site to do amazingly well. There are a ton of links on each page, so the link equity you do have is being split many ways.

It's extremely unlikely that you're being penalized for internal links, but it might be best to focus link equity on key pages rather than spreading it so thin. With something like 168 links in the menu, you probably want to downsize. Does Christmas candy really need a link in May? Is there a better way to organize brands? You can't rank for every term - prioritize some pages that you rank moderately well for with high search interest.

And finally, watch out for keyword cannibalization. I don't think this is a huge issue on your site, but you should probably link to http://www.candygalaxy.com/blue-candy/ from within the content on http://www.candygalaxy.com/blue-candy-buffets/ as an example.

[cbielich]

I wouldn't be worried about links like this, there are so many out there I think Google understands they can't penalize every site that has one of these. Every site on the internet would be hit

Keep an eye on those directory sites. I know in my first hit from Penguin 1.0 I found tons of directory links that were just spammy.

When you click on the "Submit Link" see if you can pay for the links. If you can then get rid of those links asap. Many of these directories are hard to get a hold of someone so I have had to disavow many of these links. I have a link of a text file that I add too of spammy directories I have found and I continue to add to it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2659865/spammydirectories.txt

Directories while many may be safe, this late in the game of Penguin you are better of without them IMO.

Only a handful are safe:

• dmoz.org
• yahoo.com
• business.com

Go to webmaster tools and find all those directories...

[Njave_MCP]

We are basing this on what research and real life example here? Has he been hit with a warning of any sorts? Was the website's rankings being dropped in any relation to this? Also, doing anything out of the ordinary when things are currently working perfectly is a straight path to problems in any aspect in life, but from what I know from personal experience so it is with optimization as well.

Here's a checklist I go through when these matters come in hand:

1. When did the links get indexed by Google?
2. How much time has passed?
3. Was the site hit by any of the recent algorithm updates?
4. Did my website drop severely in rankings?
5. Am I doing the best to keep healthy and authoritative links creation in check?

If you haven't been hit by anything, your rankings are there, your healthy link building is there, unique content being created and natural links pointing to the site itself, why would you waste time and money on something you clearly did not do, do not control and hasn't affected you yet? His example may be somewhat different, but basically fixing something that ain't broke is really not the go to way here.

If and when his website does get hit by a penalty, do something. Make the list of links, anchor texts, create a contact list for the administrators of that website, keep a disavow tool list in check, but use it when you need to do so. Thanks!

[KarlBantleman]

I wouldn't agree that you don't need to worry about bad links built 18 months ago. Google are always refining their algorithm so you shouldn't just hope that your links won't be seen and penalised.

[Njave_MCP]

Hello! It means that spammy link that just links to your site without anchor text and it's a nofollow links does not value the same as something with straight keyword name anchor text in the link itself. So page you have shown us here is probably devalued with Google it doesn't pose any real value or threat to your site, however you wanna put it. How are your anchor texts spread out through the link profile?

[Jonathan_Murrell]

Here is an example of one of the links

http://download.tntandroid.com/links.html

[Jonathan_Murrell]

Hi thanks for your insight.  What do you mean by "link profile introduction" I didn't mean to leave relevant information out of the question?

Thanks!

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Jonathan,

Lets deal with the disavow-ing first. I'd do a backlink analysis of the website and find ALL the links that look irrelevant and spammy and try and get them taken down first, if that fails then use the disavow tool but only if you are 100% sure they are doing you harm. It's a tricky thing the disavow tool but Google does urge you to try and get them removed before using it.

In terms of the website and the products in the footer...Why not create a section in the main body of the website such as "Customer Favourites" or "Most Popular". The reason for this is because, I'm not sure if users would scroll to the footer whereas if it is in the main body of the website, your customers are more likely to see it.

[Njave_MCP]

Hello! Honestly you shouldn't worry about any bad links created two years ago. If they were hurting your website, it would of been seen a year or so ago, not now. One simple aspect of driving more traffic (but not directly) would be social media profiles created specifically for that phrase and thus allowing a lot more people to visit your website. Talking offhand about what's the cause of your issues without the link profile introduction is really unprofessional and thus if you want a more straightforward answer, some insights on the number of links, link profile looks and such would be useful. Thanks!