Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
-
Hello,
I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links.
I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000!
Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000.
This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
-
Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.
-
I would disavow the blogspot subdomains individually. So you'd have 1000 lines that say:
domain:subdomain-name.blogspot.com
The documentation for the disavow tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html) says the following:
Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.What we don't know, however, is if we can do a disavow:blogspot.com to get everything from blogspot. I wouldn't trust it to do this and I would definitely disavow each individual subdomain.
If you don't have a manual penalty then there is no way to upload anything other than your disavow file to Google. Your disavow file is not read by a human. It is machine processed. You simply need to trust that you have done a thorough job and then, when Penguin refreshes, if you've got a good base of good links you should see an improvement.
-
I remember G saying that you should include links you've removed in disavow as well. You can add a comment before you list all the removed links but I don't think G manually reads disavow files anyways.
Since it's algorithmic, you just need to disavow/remove all those sitewide footer links and fix your anchor profile. Check out this case study as it is very similar to your situation.
-
In my opinion, if you are going to use the main domain that is blogspot.com it will probably disavow any link that is coming from blogspot.com which means if later down the list if you get a good link from the blogspot, even it will not give you any help!
In my case, I used the sub-domains and it worked fine for me!
Hope this helps!
-
We didn't receive a penalty letter, but our traffic and search queries impression went down when there was an algorithm update with footer links.
I don't have the original list of subdomains that removed our footer links, is it really necessary for Google? I mean, can't they realize that there aren't SO MANY links coming from Blogspot anymore? And is there a section in disavow links where i can upload a list of removed links i can show Google? Or do i just state that I removed so many with a list of the subdomains in a written notice when doing a disavow (never done a disavow, so this is new to me).
THis problem won't continue either because we stopped our partnership with the blog template devloper, so anything after 2 years ago and on...we are not a part of new consumer blogs.
Looking forward to your reply and other suggestions.
-
I'm assuming you received a manual penalty letter.
I would do the separate subdomains (if this is a complete list and new ones aren't being created) since it shows more effort and won't discredit any links you get from legit .blogspot blogs. Be sure to include the domains you've successfully removed in your disavow file as well.
If this is a problem that will continue (more people will create new sites with your footer link), you might have to disavow the whole domain.
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
-
Subdomain Place Holder
So long story short - we are rolling out a new website earlier than expected. Unfortunately, we are being rushed and in order to make the deadline, we have decided to create a www2. subdomain and release our HTML only version of the site for the next 2 weeks. During that time, the HTML site will be ported over to a Drupal 8 instance, and resume its www. domain. My question is - will a temporary (302) from www to ww2 and then back to www screw the proverbial pooch? Is there a better way to implement a temporary site? Feel free to probe with some questions - I know I could be clearer here 😉 Thanks community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BDS20160 -
Is a link inside a video player considered an inbound link from the domain the player is embedded in?
Good afternoon...We just added a link to our homepage inside the menu of our video player. In the link below, if you click on the menu icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, you'll see a "Powered by WellcomeMat" link at the bottom of the menu. http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/kt216e25172416n/-Rancho-Santa-Fe/Ca/92067/16596-Via-Lago-Azul/1234567890/ My question for the community is would that link be considered an inbound link from any site that has the video player embedded? So hypothetically, the video player is embedded into www.abcd.com. If a user would click on that link and go to our homepage, would search engines recognize that as an inbound link from abcd.com, even though it sits within our video player? And most of the time, the player sits within an iframe. So that's why I'm not 100% sure. Thanks for reading and for your help! It's much appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian7201 -
Links on page
Hi I have a web page which lists about 50-60 products which links out to either a pdf on the product or the main manufacturers website page containing product detail. The site in non e-commerce is this the site/page likely to get hit by Penguin? Would it be best to create a separate page for the product/manufacturer group i.e 5 or 6 pages but linking out to the PDFs etc...?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Experience with Google Disawow Tool and discovering bad back-links
Hi Community, is there any experience to tell here about the disawow tool from Google? Any review? It have helped revocer sites beaten by Penguin or penalized after WMT Unnatural Link building message? Which tools and methods you use to find bad back-links to submit for the disawow tool? Thanks for your feedback,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Braumueller0 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Website architecture and sitewide link
Hello, I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link... I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me. What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about golf in florida that a good practicee to do that or not ? I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice. However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related ) Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0