Disavow first (and link removal outreach second) as tactic?
-
I need to remove/disavow hundreds of domains due to an algorithmic penalty. Has anyone disavowed first and done the outreach thing second as a tactic?
The reason why I was considering this was as follows:
- Most of the websites are from spammy websites and unlikely to have monitored accounts/available contact details.
- My business is incredibly seasonal, only being easily profitable for half of the year. The season starts from next month so the window of opportunity to get it done is small. If there's a Penguin update before I get it done, then it could be very bad news.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
(Incidentally, if you are interested in, I also posted here about it: http://moz.com/community/q/honest-thoughts-needed-about-link-building-removal)
-
Thanks Marie.
Sorry, yes, by "take effect", I meant see better results in the SERPS.
I understand that I have been affected by Penguin (I had an audit carried out by Paul Macnamara, who you referred me onto. He was great, BTW).
So I guess it's just a waiting game. I'm crossing my fingers very tightly!
From Paul's audit, I do have a good base of links, and I am continuing to build them. Also, for many keywords, the site actually ranked higher before any link building was ever done by the bad SEO company. With these things in mind, I'm really, really, really hoping that my fortunes will change on the next Penguin refresh - whenever that might be!! Will be very disappointed if not. SUCH a frustrating thing as it feels very much out of my control.
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
-
It really depends on what you mean by "take effect". As soon as you submit the disavow, Google starts applying an invisible nofollow tag to each link that you have in that file as they crawl the web. However, in some cases, it can take 6 months or more for all of the links to get crawled.
Will you see a change in rankings after you file a disavow? I have seen some sites where within 24-48 hours there is an improvement which is always nice. However, if you were affected by the Penguin algorithm then you won't see any improvement until Google refreshes Penguin which could be any day now or even months from now. AND, in order to see improvement you have to have good links present. If your previous rankings were there because of links that are now deemed unnatural, then there may be no improvement at all either now or when Penguin refreshes.
-
Marie, in your experience, does it take weeks or months or most disavows to take effect? I submitted my disavow file 3 weeks ago and nothing so far...
-
Absolutely do the disavow first. There's no reason not to, especially if you are dealing with an algorithmic issue. (For some sites with manual penalties, I'll submit a disavow as soon as I can and then do the outreach.)
On a side note, if you have an algorithmic issue (i.e. Penguin), no one knows for sure whether you even need to remove links. Of course, there are benefits to removing links. Google will tell you to do so because you don't want people to look at your site's links and see bad ones online. But, I recently asked John Mueller in a hangout whether link removal (as opposed to disavow) was necessary for Penguin and here's what he said:
From a theoretical point of view, using the disavow tool is enough...from a practical point of view it almost always makes sense to still delete those links as much as possible.
You can see the response here at about 41:20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYooFjmx5c&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA&index=2
The main reason why removing may be better than disavowing is because it can take weeks or months for a site on your disavow list to get recrawled and as such be disavowed. However, I have found that in most cases, if you have spammy links, if you don't control the login info you used for link submission (or if there is no way for you to remove the link yourself) the response rate is always very poor (like 10-15% if you're lucky).
If you've been hit by Penguin, there are two things that need to be in place in order to recover:
1. An EXTREMELY thorough link audit and disavow. IMO it's not enough to get 80-90% of the bad links. The only sites I have seen recover had close to 100% disavowed. This means doing a manual review of every single domain linking to you from every source you can find.
2. A site that has a base of good natural links with the ability to attract new links. If you don't have that and you are planning on manufacturing your own links again then you probably will not recover.
-
In light of the all round astonishment I went and checked the actual numbers, rather than off the top of my head - it was 44% removed.
So still way better than I'd expected.
-
Hi Emma
First of all, great news that your penalty was lifted. Are things back to what they were prior to the penalty being imposed?
In terms of my website... As it's an algorithmic penalty, not a manual one, there's no reinclusion request to submit in my case. So, the only way I can show penance is to show that some links have been manually removed - most likely I would only get a very small percentage of these removed, if any, due to the spammy nature of these sites.
I can still go through this outreach process. But, I mainly wondered if there was any disadvantage in doing the disavow first. I am very concerned that there could be a Penguin update before I get chance to outreach then disavow. Due to the seasonality of my market, a few weeks can make a dramatic difference to the chance of survival of the business. The window of opportunity for sales happens in the spring and summer.
I can always do a second round of disavowing afterwards.
Thanks
Coral
-
50% is a shockingly high success rate, way above the norm. I had a 16% success rate on one of our sites and around 35% on one of our much larger sites. I had one of the top names ever in SEO tell us that 5% would be a good success rate, though I think that's lowballing a bit.
-
Interesting video... loving Matt Cutts' T-shirt
There's no reinclusion request to be made as it's just an algorithmic penalty. Not a manual penalty.
-
Your stats are interesting, and show much better success than anyone else's I've heard. 50% is amazing, but doesn't seem that representative of the general experience (from what I've read). Well done to you though.
Just to clarify, I'm not thinking that there will be a Penguin update in the next three weeks. Rather, if there is an update and I haven't actioned it, that's things looking pretty bleak for me for the entire season. Because, by the time the next one arrives, it could be too late (as things are quiet again).
-
The disavow tool is technically a recommendation to Google to ignore the toxic links, it does not have to disavow any, let alone all of the sites that you suggest. The point of sorting out a penalty is is performing penance and proving you won't do it again. Taking the easiest step first without recording efforts that show that you have tried to resolve it manually won't make you pass the manual review.
I know this for a fact as the agency that got us in a penalty in the first place performed two disavows before I took over and lifted our penalty. I manually checked over 10,000 and recorded my efforts for all, only then was it lifted. I understand that you want to fix it quickly as it is your business, but there is no quick fix other than playing by goggles rules on this one and showing that you understand that spammy links are not good. I recommend email out reach and recording everything on a goggle doc to send through with your re inclusion request. Best of luck
-
Coraltoes,
There isn't any question about whether or not you can go straight to the disavow tool as a first step in cleaning up bad links, as Matt Cutts confirms here. Exactly what the difference is between doing that and first communicating to all spammy link webmasters so that you have that file to include with your reinclusion request isn't so clear cut.
-
Hi,
I think Its a Good idea to disavow first and then Go after the Link removal thing.
I have a domain which got penguin penalty , We have Spent alot of time in removing links and Still have domains where links can not be deleted duw to certain issues So Atlast We have to disavow them.
So I would advise you to Disavow all of the bad backlinks first and then spend time in removing them.
Also, As Matt said above, It is impossible to recover domain from penguin in around 3 weeks Time.
You my better to start a New domain.
Thanks
-
Have to say I haven't done it your way round - we've completed three rounds of email outreach then submitted a disavow file, so I don't want to guess to far on advisability of doing it the other way around. For starters I've no idea how well / quickly Google handles domains removed from a disavow list.
Your first assumption needs comment though - every domain we're removing links from was from a spammy website (zero quality SEO directory), as a result of a submission package they bought years back before I joined.
We managed to get about 50% of the list removed from that email outreach process. Granted one was a directory network with over 100 domains, but even counting their domains as one that we got about 40% success.
Around 10% responded with a demand for a fee - ranging from 99c to $50. Clearly all those were instant place in disavow list
So to summarise I was really surprised how successful the email outreach part was - we'd been expecting next to nothing by way of response rate rather than around 50% success.
Even if you do it disavow first, hoping for a Penguin update in the next three weeks so the file is actioned prior to your season starting is a little optimistic!
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
-
Improve First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID)
Please suggest me how to improve First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID) for my website (http://www.mastersindia.co/) on mobile. All the java scripts moved into footer, added async and defer on JS. Also, apply all the possible ways suggested buy the Google pagespeed insights tool but we did not see more improvement. We tried to defer and async all the CSS but while doing this our website gets break. Please help me to solve it. thread-18712370-27405935606745616.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Internal Linking
Hi I've been looking over my pages and it says for this page for example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/1-6kw-halogen-heater I have too many links, I think it was about 178. These links are from the menu and bottom of the page - how much of an issue is this for internal linking structure? I wouldn't want to remove the menus or change them too much. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Do allow or disavow, that is the question!
We're in the middle of a disavow process and we're having some difficulty deciding whether or not to disavow links from Justia.com and prweb.com - justia.com alone is giving us 23,000 links with just 76 linked pages. So, to allow, or disavow? That's the question! What do you think guys? Thank you. John.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
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 -
Confusion about forums and canonical links
Like many people, I get a lot of alerts about duplicate content, etc. I also don't know if I am hurting my domain authority because of the forum. It is a pretty active forum, so it is important to the site. So my question is, right now there could be 50 pages like this <domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrickPicker
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-1
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-2
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-3
all the way to:
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-50</domain></domain></domain></domain></domain> So right now the rel canonical links are set up just like above, including the page numbers. I am not sure if that is the best way or not. I really thought that all the of links for that topic should be
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/ that way it would passing "juice" to the main topic/link. </domain> I do have other links setup for:
link rel='next',link rel='up',link rel='last' Overall is this correct, or is there a better way to do it?0 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Natural Link Profile, low and high value links, really?
I cant really get my head around this one. I've read a few times when building links make sure you pick up so low value links as well. So here is an example (and lets say each link takes half hour to get): I got 5 hours of link building and this is what I have managed to get with the time. 1. 10 high value links all with PA/DA 50-60+ 2. 5 high value links with PA/DA 50-60+ AND another 5 low value links with PA/DA 10-. Surely #1 beats #2 hands down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0