Disavow Issues
-
Hi
We have a client who was hit by Penguin about 18 months ago.
We disavowed all the bad links about 10 months ago however this has not resulted in an uplift in traffic or rankings.
The client is asking me whether it would be better to dump the domain and move the website to a fresh domain.
Can you provide thoughts / experience on this please?
Thanks.
-
Just wanted to clarify (for the sake of others who may read this post) that the question was in regards to Penguin and I think in your situation, you're dealing with manual penalties. With Penguin, there is no reconsideration request. You've got to clean up the best you can and then hope that things improve when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm.
It's still up for debate whether removing links (as opposed to disavowing) is important for Penguin. My current advice is that if a link is easy to remove then do it. But, otherwise I disavow. While you're right that it is important to show Google your efforts in regards to link removal for a manual penalty, no one is going to look at your work for an algorithmic issue.
I asked John Mueller in a hangout once whether disavowing was as good as removing for Penguin and he said, "essentially yes". However, because there are potential problems that could come up with the disavow tool (such as improper formatting or taking too long to recrawl to disavow), if you can remove the link that's not a bad thing to do.
-
Hi Paul,
I realise it's been a couple of weeks since this was submitted, but I wanted to follow up. At my former agency, we went through a few reconsideration procedures for new clients. We managed to be successful with all of them, but some took quite a long time (August - February being the longest).
We have found that disavowing alone is not nearly enough to make a difference - it is far preferable for the links to be removed. Unlike Claudio below, we have had a far higher rate than 5%, but it all depends on where the links come from. Sometimes it's hard to even find a live email address to contact webmasters, and some people want payment to remove links (worth doing if the payment is not too high). We crafted templates and _always _followed up within two weeks if we did not get a response from first emailing someone for a link removal with another specifically crafted email template.
It's true that if you cannot remove links, it is still worthwhile demonstrating to Google that you attempted to do so, with email screenshots or at least a list of the sites you contacted. They want to see effort. They want to see that you removed, or attempted to remove, the vast majority of the bad links. It's time consuming and tedious, but it's worth it if you get the penalty removed.
As I said, the longest process we went through was over six months, but the site in question had a TERRIBLE backlink profile that was the result of years of abuse by bad link builders. We're talking removing thousands of links. However, it came through - the penalty was removed and the client's rankings are on the rise.
I hope this helps. The short version is: remove remove remove. You won't maintain a penalty if there are no more bad links holding the site back, and those links aren't helping it rank anyway.
If you'd like some advice on how to decide which links to remove and which to keep, please let me know. In the meantime, check out this post from my former colleague Brandon at Ayima. It's a good resource for link analysis.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Does the site have a good base of truly natural links? There have been very few reported cases of Penguin recovery. But, the ones that I have seen recover are ones that have had some excellent links left once the bad ones were cleaned up.
-
Did you have a manual penalty? Did you get it revoked? or did you assume you had a Penguin issue and were proactive about it to avoid a manual penalty?
-
Recovery from Link Penalty (manual or algorithm) procedure:
1. Collect inboud links from Google Webmaster Tools + Moz link explorer + Link Majestic.
2. Include all domains in a Excel worksheet.
3. Contact site owners asking for link removal (usually 5% of sucess, but the effort counts for Google).
4. Wait several weeks for the removal of the links.
5. Fill a disavow file and upload it to Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1
6. Wait for 3 or 6 weeks and start a link building campain starting with a few links per week and increase it if you can (only natural links comming from authority sites related to your niche).
Recovers from Content problems.
1. Look for repetitive title and descriptions, use Google Webmaster Tools and Moz.
2. Look for pages with similar or identical content and fix it.
3. Look for pages with less than 200 words of convent and add content or simply remove them (404).
4. Add new fresh and original content.
Google will consider your effort and it will be increasing your rank step by step.
I hope it helps
Claudio
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
-
Href lang issues - help needed!
Hi, I have an issue with Google indexing the US version of our website rather than the UK version on Google.co.uk. I have added hreflang tags to both sites (https://www.pacapod.com/ and https://us.pacapod.com/), have updated and submitted an XML sitemap for each website and checked that the country targeting in search console is set-up correctly but Google are still indexing the wrong website. I would be grateful for any assistance with this issue. Many thanks Eddie
Technical SEO | | mypetgiftbox0 -
Email and landing page duplicate content issue?
Hi Mozers, my question is, if there is a web based email that goes to subscribers, then if they click on a link it lands on a Wordpress page with very similar content, will Google penalize us for duplicate content? If so is the best workaround to make the email no index no follow? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
Issues with getting a web page indexed
Hello friends, I am finding it difficult to get the following page indexed on search: http://www.niyati.sg/mobile-app-cost.htm It was uploaded over two weeks back. For indexing and trouble shooting, we have already done the following activities: The page is hyperlinked from the site's inner pages and few external websites and Google+ Submitted to Google (through the Submit URL option) Used the 'Fetch and Render' and 'Submit to index' options on Search Console (WMT) Added the URL on both HTML and XML Sitemaps Checked for any crawl errors or Google penalty (page and site level) on Search Console Checked Meta tags, Robots.txt and .htaccess files for any blocking Any idea what may have gone wrong? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
404 issues
Hello, Some time ago, something like a month and a half) I have removed all 404 errors from the google index and the webmaster tools have removed them already, however yesterday moz found the same 404 errors that i have removed from indexing (tose pages are deleted or redirected by the site developer). What could be an issue here and why webmaster tools are not registering those 404 errors but moz analytics does. And the other question is if those pages do not exist can i track where the placed? I tried dowloading moz crawl test, but the refering source was not provided. I would highly appreciate anyones help. Thank you
Technical SEO | | rikomuttik0 -
Hreflang and possible duplicate content SEO issue
| 0 <a class="vote-down-off" title="This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful">down vote</a> favorite | Hey community, my first question here 🙂 Imagine there is a page with video, it has hreflang tags setup, to lead let's say German visitors to /de/ folder... So, on that German version of page, everything like menus, navigation and such are in German, but the video is the same, the title of the video (H1 tag) is the same, <title></code></strong> and <strong><code>meta description</code></strong> is the same as on the original English page. It means that general (English) page and German version of it has the same key content in English.</p> <p>To me it seems to be a SEO duplicate content issue. As I know, Google doesn't think that content is duplicate, if it is properly translated to other language.</p> <p>Does my explained case mean that the content will be detected by Google as duplicate?</p> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Technical SEO | | poiseo0 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Crawl issues/ .htacess issues
My site is getting crawl errors inside of google webmaster tools. Google believe a lot of my links point to index.html when they really do not. That is not the problem though, its that google can't give credit for those links to any of my pages. I know I need to create a rule in the .htacess but the last time I did it I got an error. I need some assistance on how to go about doing this, I really don't want to lose the weight of my links. Thanks
Technical SEO | | automart0