To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
-
Hi,
One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links?
Thanks
-
Thanks Kevin
-
If you send a reconsideration request, the Google doc will help you make a case.
-
Thank you clarification Tom! You've been very helpful.
Hi Kevin, How do you get in touch with Google to explain you've made an effort to follow to guidelines?
-
Great answer Tom.
Whenever I disavow a link, I also will ask the webmaster of the incoming link to remove it and document the correspondence in a Google Doc. This documentation can be extremely valuable in a reconsider request if Google penalize your site in the future that you made an effort in following their guidelines before the penalization.
-
Hi there
Removing the links outright will always be the more preferential option. It shows that you have taken definitive action and it is likely to be acknowledged faster by Google and the other search engines.
Having said that, the disavow file, once processed, will theoretically ignore the link just as effectively as removing the link itself. We just have no sure way of knowing.
With that in mind, if I can get the link removed at any time, I'll always go for that option. But the disavow should suffice if you make the effort to remove the link prior, as Google suggests.
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
-
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
Disavowing Affiliate Links - Domain or Actual Affiliate Link?
Hi everyone, Hope you're all having a great day, I have a question in regards to a site which I am about to disavow. Over the past 2 months a certain page of ours has dropped from the 2nd page, all the way to the 7th. I haven't been able to diagnose why, however, yesterday I discovered that a site has been using an Lafitte link on his sidebar, the link is a do-follow. Webmaster tools indicates that this site has linked to us over 24,000 times. I understand that this link could potentially ruin our rankings - however, in terms of disavowing, what is the best approach here? Do I disavow their domain, or do I disavow the actual affiliate link also? The link is placed within an image, once the image is clicked it redirects you to another link for a second then redirects to our money site. We have got in touch with our affiliate program and they have made the link a no-follow, however, we are pretty certain this site is causing issues for us and we want to go ahead and disavow. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Should I try to change these links or no?
Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed. Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices. Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/ Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
How often does the WMT incoming links gets updated?
Hi, We made some drastic changes removing links (mainly resulted from one domain) and wondered when we should expect a change in the incoming links report of Google's WMT...? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Site wide links removal
A website of mine has about 4,000 backlinks of which 2,500 of them are coming from one website to the homepage and about 6 internal pages. These have been built up over about 5 years, mainly via article posts. The site was recently hit via penguin 2.0 but has only had natural links built so i'm wondering if the sitewide links are in fact the issue? The website linking to mine is an authority source within its niche but the concern is the amount of backlinks coming from this one site and if it may now be seen as having a negative impact. When ive reviewed the links from this one site via a backlink removal tool about 80% seem fine and suggestions are to remove about 20% of the backlinks. Would you keep all the sitewide backlinks or remove them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Have you come across a similar situation and how did it affect ranking/traffic?0 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0