Lost rankings after disavowing links

[VinceWicks]

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?

[VinceWicks]

Nope. still no luck (

[TheDude]

Vince/Tom/Michael,

Any updates?

I just did a second round of disavowing and am seeing a substantial drop.

[PTCCTV]

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!

[VinceWicks]

Thanks, David. Yeah, I totally feel like I should not have done that but your shared experience gives me hope.

[VinceWicks]

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?

[David-E-Carey]

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

[TomRayner]

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 Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?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.