64,476 Links from a PR1 Site - Should I Disavow???
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We recently discovered in Google Webmaster Tools that a Chinese website with a page rank of 1 has 64,476 links to various pages of our website which is about 120,000 pages in size. Their site covers the same topic as our site - technical information about plastics.
My question is, should I let things take its natural course or would it be better to 'block' their site using Google Disavow?
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Thank you all. At a high level based on your input, it makes sense to do nothing at all as traffic rankings for our site have been on the rise and this site has linked to us for at least 3 years with no associated affect. The only bummer is that it does appear to be scraped and some human intervention as many links are broken, but thankfully hit our 404 error page. We have contacted them 3 times over the past month, to no avail - most likely due to either language/translation barriers, or simply due to the fact that they have so many broken links that it's not worth their time to fix them.
To answer some of Doug's questions, traffic from their site is minimal but appear as quality visits: 94 visits per month, 8.53 pages per visit, 8:40 minutes on site, 10.64% bounce rate. Their link neighborhood doesn't look exceptional, however the website relationships all appear to be about the same topic - plastics.
The links are not in the footer, but instead a link from a specific plastic like Lexan 101 to our Lexan 101 page - pretty relevant, their site is a PR5 and is a legitimate business. They simply appear to be referencing our site for more technical information on the plastics they sell.
Just threw a red flag at me because of the excessive number of links from one domain and we work very hard to protect our reputation.
Any other comments are most welcome - again thank you all!
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That sounds like an awful lot of links from one site. Is it a footer link? I've previously had this problem with a client of mine. Can you not try to get in touch with this site before you do/don't Disavow?
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Might be hard to tell on a Chinese site, but can you take a look at the context? Is there a reason why they're linking to your pages?
Can you establish whether they are a legitimate business/website?
Who else are they linking to and who's linking to them? (What's the neighbourhood look like?)
Are you getting any referral traffic from those links? If so, what can you tell about those visitors?
How big a proportion of your link profile are these links? Is it seriously unbalancing your link profile?
I've seen something similar with product/service comparison pages that automatically scrape your price and a have "Look we're cheaper, check them out if you want" link to their competitors sites.
If they are linking to you and have a legitimate reason to do so - is there an opportunity there? Can you establish a business relationship? (Obviously depends on why they're linking.)
I wouldn't hit the big red disavow button without knowing a little more about the impact of those links might have and the potential risk - which may be mitigated by the strength/size of your overall link profile.
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I agree 100% with echo here. Google disavow makes me nervous as heck. I've yet to use it even though I've seriously considered it a few times...
If your impressions and traffic hasn't taken a hit and you have no warnings, I'd stick with it.
Either way, build content and gain links that are relevant. That's the only sure-fire way of keeping up with your SERPs.
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I would start by asking a few questions like:
- how long have you been having those links for?
- have you seen a important decrease in traffic or rankings since you acquired those links?
- is the anchor text the same for all of those links?
- have you experienced traffic and rankings decrease after Penguin 2.0?
You have to make sure first those links hurt you before starting disavowing them. Check your Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools for any warnings or penalties. If everything looks fine I wouldn't do it although I must say that many links looks suspicious.
Keep building links from trusted websites and create useful content, there is no way around it.
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