Lost rankings after disavowing links
-
About two months ago, I received an unnatural inbound links message from Google. Then I disavowed 58 (the worst ones) and now I can see that right after the date I submitted my disavow file I'm losing rankings. What would you suggest?
I don't really want to revoke my disavow file because it has totally bad links.
I have this idea to build 58 links from high quality sites (instead of the 58 I disavowed). Do you think it'll work faster (if at all) or I just need to remove my disavow file?
-
Nope. still no luck (
-
Vince/Tom/Michael,
Any updates?
I just did a second round of disavowing and am seeing a substantial drop.
-
Vince,
I too have seen the same after using disavow. I did not have a manual penalty, but noticed some ranking drops related to Penguin, or Panda, or whichever was spammy links. I got rid of a bunch of low quality links and noticed a drop, not instantly but after about 1 month.
My question for you Vince, is have you seen an improvement since then? I am hoping you have!
-
Thanks, David. Yeah, I totally feel like I should not have done that but your shared experience gives me hope.
-
Thanks for your reply, Tom. Thing is, I added my bad links to the disavow tool but I did not send a reconsideration request because because disavowed links seem to be triggered by major algo updates as well. It looks that mine was triggered by the one that happened on July 18. Do you think I still need to email Google and ask to reconsider?
-
Like you Vince, I went through the process of disavowing a number of links with Google and Bing and yes a week or so later I started to see a big rank dips. The links had been sending traffic that skewed my bounce rate and visitor page time rate, quite literally adding 1000's of visitors a month. Now after a few months the site has returned to its normal monthly stats and rankings are back to normal. But it took about 2-3 months for this to all work through.
I know how you feel 'Why did I do that? darn it' but I think like Tom says it's better to stick out and not remove the disavow file and focus on building good content for people to link too.
David
-
Hi Vince
What happened when you disavowed the links? Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?
Until you get a message saying the manual penalty has been lifted, it won't matter what you do to your rankings or links - they'll keep on going down.
I'd definitely keep the disavow file in there (and add to it if needs be) and keep filing reconsideration requests until the penalty has been lifted.
It's worth noting as well that sometimes these bad links will be powering up your site. I mean, one of the reasons people use bad links, for black-hat reasons, is because they can and do work. However, they're not sustainable in my eyes. If you've built a site with bad links, you're effectively a ticking time bomb and that's probably not the healthiest way to do business - at least in my opinion.
So disavowing those links could quite conceivably been the cause for the drop in rankings (even if you didn't have a penalty), but you're much healthier in the long run. My recommendation - after getting that penalty removed first and foremost - would be to replace those links with high quality and authoritative ones, as you have mentioned.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Page Name Tracking - Without UTM links
Hello, Our current site is fully html with no cms. We're moving to a newer version today with a typo 3 cms. My one worry is as follows; On some pages an internal link opens a jquery lightbox, inside the lightbox will be a video or download link. I cannot simply add a standard event url like I wanted to (utm_ link) as the pages are linked via the cms pointing to different pages, not the url's. We really need the following appearing in Analytics, whether its an event or landing page; The click of the light-box link The click of the video OR download link inside the lightbox. I would really, really appreciate any help on this as the new website is going live today, regardless whether this has been resolved. Thank you very much in advance of any replies. twY8s8B.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Get anchor text, nofollow info etc from a list of links
Hi everybody. I'm currently doing a backlink audit for a client and I've hit a small problem. I'm combining data from Ahrefs, OSE, Webmaster Tools and Link Detox. I've got around 27k links in total now, but the issue is that WMT does not provide data on target page, anchor text and nofollow/dofollow. This means I have around 1k links with only partial information. Does anyone know of a way that I can get this data automatically? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Blink-SEO1 -
Google webmaster links vs Moz Reporte do follow links
A bit confused about my seo reports for a site I am tracking in Moz. Google webmaster reports i have 1836 links to my domain.
Reporting & Analytics | | KenW
Moz reports 273 external followed links.
Website Auditor reports 449 dofollow and 338 no follow.> total 787
What is important factor that I should be reporting to my client that really matters?0 -
Difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links?
Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | lincolndigitalgroup1 -
What is the difference between External Followed Links, Total External Links and Total Links?
What is the difference between Total External Links and Total Links? Below is my metric and 3 competitors. | External Followed Links | 12 | 43 | 227 | 5 |
Reporting & Analytics | | seohlp44
| Total External Links | 19 | 51 | 296 | 11 |
| Total Links | 2,990 | 704 | 15,234 | 12,518 |0 -
What is the best tool to look at Internal Links?
My site has on average 220 internal links a page largely due to how the site is built ie every page shows every link via the menu system, which isnt great, but from what i have read there isnt much i can do about it. However, this week 3 pages jumped to over 400 links and the home page over 500 internal links, GWT will only show me 200 of them, Is there a tool that i can use that will list all my internal links, so i can find out why this has happened? Thanks Ash
Reporting & Analytics | | AshShep10 -
Rank tracker tool - seomoz
Hi All, I have noticed that ranks in the tool -rank tracker are not correct for my keywords sometimes. Does anybody else has experienced this? Isn't it real time updated? What other free rank tracker tool you guys would suggest which can send you weekly accurate updates? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
Internal Links not Showing Up
Hi, I have a wordpress blog at www.learnbonds.com. I am looking through open site explorer and and showing only 9 internal links on my report. I have hundreds of internal links on the site so I am wondering why they are not showing up? Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Reporting & Analytics | | fxtrader19790