When/ What Links to Disavow?

[foodsleuth]

We have an older website started in 2000.  We have thousands of backlinks which we believe are hurting us. Starting with Panda our site has been devastated, traffic wise, from a million + page views a month to 1/3 of that now.  We've never solicited links, never paid for them, they just happened.  It seems every "search engine" and spammy site on the web has links to us.  Hundreds if not thousands from sites like , 29searchengines.com, 55 searchengines.net, and on and on..

1.  How does a site know when the links are harmful?
2.  How do you know which links should be disavowed?

Thank you

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi,

I'm going to answer with 2 separate and very excellent blog posts that can answer the question much better than I can:

• http://seogadget.com/link-auditing/
• http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

There are also a number of automated tools out there link Link Detox, but a manual review is always necessary before disavowing links.

Also keep in mind that although Panda might have some backlink elements baked in as part of the algorithm, most people consider Panda to be mostly caused by on-site issues, such as duplicate content. You may want to do a bit of digging into recovering from Panda penalties, including removing thin and duplicate content, and improving on site experiences, before removing links.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[MoosaHemani]

Unfortunate but the truth is if you do not have many of authority links, these low quality links and directories will hurt your link profile and you might see a decline in traffic or worst case Google will manually penalize you!

How does a site know when the harmful links point back to my website? No easy game, do check your links at least on monthly basis and if you find any low quality spammy link then update the disavow file accordingly.

You can check the recent links by Open Site Explorer’s Just Discovered or Ahrefs New Links!

How do you know which links should be disavowed? Now thats a real question and a tough one! Well the easy answer to that is buy a link disavow tool like link risk or link detox and they will tell you what links are bad but as per my experience it’s not like they are always right all the time, so you should have to have some manual indicators.

Here are mine

-          Links from Blog Comments (wow, what a great site… type of comments), Forum links, Press Release Links are all usually give a negative juice so this is one of the indicator, when you see these kind of link, either remove the link or update the link in the disavow file.

-          Check their domain Moz trust and Google PR.

-          Check their link profile and see from where they are getting links. If their link profile is nasty consider disavowing them.

-          Paid Links

-          Irrelevant links

Hope this helps!!

[Felip3]

Panda Target content, does your website has a lot of pages with very little content? Like less than 300 words?

If you were hit by Panda you have to improve your website content. I noticed that a lot of small eCommerce websites had problems with Panda not because the site had bad content but because in Google eyes the site didn't have enough unique content.

I didn't look at your site, but my intuition says that you don't have links issue.

[foodsleuth]

1.  No notices
2. The traffic drops have pretty much coincided with Panda in 2011 and with every change they've just dropped further and further.   We've not had any site changes to speak of since 2008.
3. My sense is links are one issue but I suspect there are others.

[Felip3]

1 - Do you have any notice on Google Webmaster?

2 - Do you see any huge traffic drop on GA? In the last year? If yes, you should check if there was any know Google update around that time. http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

ps: A big drop on traffic can be also cause by technical issues, so you should also check if  your site had any big update in the time the traffic drooped. (for example a cms change)

If you dont have any traffic drop or notice on GWT, I would recommend you not disavow any link.... If you see a traffic drop you have to do a link audit and conduct a link removal campaign..