Which Backlinks to Disavow?
-
I am a site owner just getting to learn more about managing things myself after outsourcing SEO to a firm a year back (they stopped all activities about 8 months back).
The question I have is about disavowing the low quality links. After collecting all the data from many sites on the basis of this helpful posting - (http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal), I am now left with around 2,800 back-links. I discovered most of the bad ones using ahrefs and majestic (and Google webmaster did not show many of the bad links). In fact, in the very first place, I realized that there was a spam problem when I saw the anchor cloud on ahrefs which showed many unrelated anchors for my site.
I have three questions:
**First, **Many URL's are actually from websites which have nothing to do with my line of business and I can sure spot them. What I get confused with is this - I can not say that these sites are downright spam. Some of them look to be good sites for example - a coffee machine vendor (with full business details and a fairly decent looking business), a Nike sports shoes mart etc. But they have nothing to do with my business.
So my first question is - What is spam really? Would a back link from a high ranking website in the travel industry be considered spam from the point of view of someone who runs a website for medical equipment, specially if the back-link is from an unrelated anchor text like - "3 nights travel package" (which has nothing to do with medical business). I think I should disavow all the low quality back links with an erroneous anchor but Id like some views on this.
Second, I see that in the disavow file, one could either upload a whole domain or a specific URL (could somebody please confirm this). I have some sites which have 8-12 (more in some cases) back links to my site. In most cases these sites are either really bad quality or have nothing to do with my business. I am tempted to disavow the entire domain for such sites instead of going by the URL's. Any views?
Third, this is what I'd really like some help with. In case I delete the very pages (on my site) to which these back links point, should I still disavow the pointing domain?
Finally: I have not created most of these backlinks. In fact, over the last 2-3 months we have started creating links from good sites in my industry. Most of the anchor cloud is good for me on ahrefs but there are these bad ones to which my question relates. I have not got any manual penalty from Google, though my traffic I think took a hit in the first week of October 2013.
-
Did you see any lost in traffic in your site lately? You should be very careful removing link many of those links might be actually helping your ranks. If you don't have any penalty or traffic decrease I think is better use of your time to keep building good links.
-
Most helpful David. Thanks for that.
I had the similar views. Really reassuring to get this from you. I'll take the liberty of asking another one which has bothered me recently - I have my site "www.abc.com". I also have a blog "www.bolg.abc.com" Do you think the bad links of the main site could in any way have a negative impact on the blog?
Also - Any experience on how long does google take to factor in the disavow?
Thanks again
Rajat
-
I'm gonna answer these in the most simple way possible, others can elaborate:
1. If the unrelated site actually featured you for something - ex. you sponsored a program for this travel company, they mention it on their site and link back to you - then that's fine. If it's totally random and not related, it's not fine. If links to you have anchor text that's not related to your site, that's spam.
2. Almost always disavow at the domain level. Exceptions would be if someone set up a spammy blogspot.com or tumblr.com page - those are big, authoritative domains and you don't want to block them completely. In that case I'd go with the URL level instead of domain level.
3. I'd still disavow the links, even if you delete the pages they point to. It's better to cover all bases in a situation like this.
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
-
Backlinks from a secondary domain
Hi i finally figured out why my link profile is out of wack. Apparently we had a second domain registered that for some reason was active and linking to us - somewhat duplicated site. no idea when or how that happened. I wasnt with the company then. anyhow Ive now pointed the domain to a blank folder since I dont know how to disable it in 1&1 Hosting (if anyone knows please let me know!). Im wondering if this is enough? will the links still be there indexed even though the domain points to a blank folder? also how can I get google to profile my backlinks again? so I can see if it worked. Currently waiting for a new Moz crawl so Ill see if at least there my profile is looking healthier. thanks in advance!
Link Building | | ACEmina0 -
Backlinks - Linking to new domain
Hello Moz community! My established client recently franchised their business by adding a metro area location. We have thousands of back links built to the corporate website, a lot of which have anchor text that are geo-targeted to the new metro area website. We still find the corporate website important, but would rather focus our efforts now on the newly franchised location. Does anyone have experience with successfully having old links changed to a new domain and if so how? When changing directory listings, such as everything on get listed, is it better do do slowly or as much at once as possible? Any recommendations or information would be appreciated! Thanks!
Link Building | | FullMedia900 -
Placing backlinks on foreign websites.
Hey community, What are your thoughts about placing backlinks on for example www.advertisment.de when you've got a dutch website. Is it better to link to website that are from the same country?
Link Building | | Onlinedesignmeubel0 -
Backlinking post penguin
Does anyone have any effective strategies about how to backlink for a new website. I'm just really cautious of this new penguin update and don't want to submit to too many directories or do anything that will get penalised, seen as the website is new.
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
How to pick the right keywords for backlink building in a Huge site
Hi there, I'm running a coupons/discounts web site, with more than 1 millon page indexed. The website niche is crearly related to Coupons, Discounts, Deals, but those discounts may apply to hundreds of different categories. Currently we are getting 15K organic visits a day. Every time we have to write blog articles to increase backlinking, the same question came up. Should we target our niche keyowrds (which are very competitive) or should we pick long tail keyword (3-4 words) to be more specific ? The 70-80% of the organic traffic we receive every day came from long tail keywords, for which we never did any offert to rank with. This 70-80% traffic lands into internal pages. So basically the question is: should I keep backlinking the home page to get more juice on my domain, which will organically flows to the long tail landing pages ? Or should I write hundreds of articles targetting directly the long tail ? I think that targetting the long tail will cost me a lot of effort, i.e. for a particular long tail google search (with 4 or more keywords) I get 10 visitis a day, ranking in postion 3. If I made a lot of effort to rank in the first position for that long tail keyword, I may only get 50 visits a day, so for duplicating my daily visit amount I should do that work for thousandths of keywords, which seems, to not have much sense. So, should we target the domain and lets the rank flows from there, or should we point to thousandths of internal long tail landing pages ? I hope I made my self clear enough. Thanks in advance
Link Building | | martincad0 -
Penguin and Backlinks
I have been looking closely at my backlinks. I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis. I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank. I have no way to prevent this. They are like a cancer. Point me to the Doctor. Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way. If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link. Advice on dealing with this? Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ? Perhaps my competitors are doing this. I simply can't tell. Any advice is appriciated.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Best way to index backlinks
We have created many high authority back links for our clients and after several months we have noticed 10% or so have actually been indexed (via multiple sources). I am trying to find a way to easily get these backlinks indexed. There is a bunch of software out there, some create RSS feeds and others social bookmark these pages. Any suggestions?
Link Building | | waqid0
