Sudden Unexplained Drop Should I Disavow
-
We saw a sudden drop of about 10-12 positions on a couple of core keywords.
We received no messages in Webmaster Tools.
I have been on board only 2 months.
I looked back at the linking profile and there are some spammy things I would never have authorized. Most of it is a couple of years old, although it seems Google is still just starting to "discover" some of the links. There are maybe 15 domains with spammy links to us and each of them have anywhere from 5-20 different links pointing our way.
Should I setup the disavow file for Google?
My concern is I draw attention to this and it may not be the reason we have dropped.
-
Thank you, Mike.
We did see some shuffling with the competition as well.
I will hold off on the disavow and instead stick to freshening content and seeking back links.
-
If you haven't received an Unnatural Links warning then I wouldn't start disavowing random links you think might be harming you... as that could just hurt you more. It is possible given all the recent flux from Penguin that this is just some more shuffling. It could also be cause by the regular shuffling within the SERPs caused by your competitors making updates and tweaks to their sites that caused them to move up.
I'd suggest an small audit of your site... see if any pages could use tweaking, if there are any thin pages then look into adding fresh content, work on gaining some relevant & natural links to your site, etc. etc.
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
-
Why did my Domain Authority drop?
I had an ok domain authority. We focused on building backlinks for our website and it shows that we received a significant number of backlinks. However, today, our DA fell significantly. I don't understand why that happened. Can someone please help me with this situation? Thank you.
Link Building | | MizbaCMU1 -
Odd one - dropping positions but traffic improving
Seem to have a bit of an odd one. For the last few months been running a backlink campaign for a 2/3 year old site, got good positions for some keywords/pages but seems to have plateaued the last 60 days or so with some keywords dropping in position.
Link Building | | seoman10
The odd thing is traffic seems to be still improving (according to GA and GSC). I am wondering if - have hit a niche ceiling
or rankbrain type thing i.e. google trying to work out what the site should be ranking for and messing with positions.
or because it is just a newish site. Any ideas?2 -
Okay to disavow these?
http://www.dickhead.hotel-online.com http://www.french.hotel-online.com http://www.sampsucks.hotel-online.com http://www.ru.hotel-online.com edit** adding http://www.travelocity.hotel-online.com and http://www.costar.hotel-online.com Also have the normal http://www.hotel-online.com backlink which i'll probably keep. It seems you can post press releases about hospitality stuff on this site, and found some with abcdefg.hotel-online.com was wondering if I should disavow them? I tried a google search for these, and none of them have a bad spam score according to moz, but also SEMrush with a low toxic score. These came up doing an semrush backlink crawl, but not a moz backlink crawl. Would it be okay to disavow these?
Link Building | | donnieath0 -
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
Link Building | | poke11 -
External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them. Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate? Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
Link Building | | ajgrossman0 -
Ranking drop Any help please
hi i got a website www.willowstairlifts.co.uk and I am doing seo for keyword Stairlifts , it was going all good i managed to get it from page 15 to page 4 but yesterday its start going backward it jumps back from position 31 to 61 , i have been very careful in doing on page and also with my link building. I have just a few directories , bookmarks and I am targeting guest post, and i have got few links from them. i cant find anything wrong and worried, as surely it can be a penalty, is it just google dance? as i am aware google is recently doing some updates which they are denying it. hope you guys can help me , many thanks
Link Building | | conversiontactics0 -
Website is Dropping in PR
Hey there. I'm new here at our company, and I'm working on SEO for a website we are working on (www.greenthumbdepot.com). We are doing some link-building (forums, articles, blogs, directory submissions, etc) and are currently trying to find some good quality links, as well. After 3 months, the site was on page 15 for the search term "hydroponics nutrients" on Google, and on the first pages of organic search for Bing and Yahoo!. However, looking again, our website has disappeared from the first 50 pages of Google (according to SEOMOZ). From what I can see, the incoming links are not spammy, and the articles we have been submitting have been driving a small amount of traffic to the site. Are we doing something incredibly wrong here? We've changed the meta tags a couple of nights ago. I'm a noob here, so please go easy on me! I'm learning... so thanks for any advice you can give. -jen
Link Building | | RENDEV0 -
Can changing our links page make our rankings drop through the floor?
Hi all, When I first started at my current job, most of the link building (aside from submitting to free directories left, right and centre) was replying to every spammy reciprocal email and adding them to our links page! Now we're all a bit wiser about such matters (thanks SEOMoz!), I want to get our links page turned into something actually useful. My plan was to get it neatly categorised, with recommendations, cut out unrelated links that would be useless to visitors and call it something like "Our Friends" I thought this might be useful for future link building efforts, but in its current state, it's a complete mess. However, I am worried about cutting out a lot of links if they have been reciprocal ones. Are the sort of sites that would be sending typical spammy link exchange emails for window installation in NY likely to notice our UK education site taking away their link six months later and take away ours? If they do, will losing links from these sites harm us? Perhaps more importantly, is my plan a terrible idea in the first place? Look forward to hearing from y'all!
Link Building | | TEFLScot0