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
-
Issues with Magento layered navigation
Hi, We use Magento v.1.7 for our store. We have recently had an SEO audit and we have uncovered 2 major issues which can be pinpointed to our layered navigation. We use the MANAdev layered navigation module. There are numerous options available to help with SEO. All our filtered urls seem to be fine ie. https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase have canonical url correctly setup and the meta tags as noindex, follow but Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google is indexing I'm at lost at how to solve this any help would be great. Thank you **This is from our SEO audit report ** The faceted navigation isn’t handled correctly and causes two major issues:● One of the faceted navigation filters causes 404 error. This means that the error isappended each sequence of the navigation options, multiplying the faulty URLs.● The pages created by the faceted nav are all accessible to the search engines. Thismeans that there are hundreds of duplicated category pages created by one of theparameters. The duplication issues can seriously hinder the organic visibility.The amount of 404 errors and the duplicated pages created by faceted navigation makes italmost impossible for a search engine crawler to finish the crawl. This means that the sitemight not be fully indexed and the newly introduced product pages or content won’t bediscovered for a very long time.
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
I have multiple URLs that redirect to the same website. Is this an issue?
I have multiple URLs that all lead to the same website. Years ago they were purchased and were sitting dormant. Currently they are 301 redirects and each of the URLs feed to different areas of my website. Should I be worried about losing authority? And if so, is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | undrdog990 -
Too many on-page links vs. UX issue
I am having an issue with many of our pages having too many on-page links. I have gotten many of them below the 100 page limit that is suggested and I understand this is not a critical factor with SEO, but my issue is this: Many important pages I am trying to optimize are buried at a "3rd" level which is actually not accessible from the home page navigation dropdown due to our outdated CMS. I am trying to decide if we should develop our site to display these pages on-hover from the main navigation. This would make a lot of sense since users would find these pages easier, however adding this functionality would increase on-page links by a lot more. So in your opinion, would it be worth it to spend the money to have this functionality developed? Or would it end up hurting our SEO standings?
Technical SEO | | isret_efront0 -
Targeting by IP Address... SEO Issues?
I'm setting up a site to display a different site header graphic depending on which U.S. State the IP address is coming from. In theory we may end up doing 50 different images, although we'll probably start with 4 or 5 and then the other states will get a "default". How will the SE's treat this... if it's just an image change, but the text on the page is the same, will it affect anything? Any best practice advice out there? thanks!
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
Home page canonical issues
I think I’ve got a canonical issue with a client’s site that I’m having problems with I’ve noticed in their analytics that they receive traffic from themselves. I’ve used ‘ rel canonical’ throughout the site to avoid any dup issues and I have 301’ed every other variation of the home page I can think of. I don’t have full access to the back end of the host to control any of the iis as it’s an asp site. They seem to be getting traffic from their site under the URL of, example.com I’ve 301 redirected www.example.com/home.asp www.example.com/default.asp www.example.com/index.asp to www.example.com And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FarkyRafiq0 -
What's the best way to solve this sites duplicate content issues?
Hi, The site is www.expressgolf.co.uk and is an e-commerce website with lots of categories and brands. I'm trying to achieve one single unique URL for each category / brand page to avoid duplicate content and to get the correct URL's indexed. Currently it looks like this... Main URL http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green Different Versions http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all/ Firstly, what is the best course of action to make all versions point to the main URL and keep them from being indexed - Canonical Tag, NOINDEX or block them in robots? Secondly, do I just need to 301 the (/) from all URL's to the non (/) URL's ? I'm sure this question has been answered but I was having trouble coming to a solution for this one site. Cheers, Paul
Technical SEO | | paulmalin0 -
301 redirect issues
Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!0 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Issues
Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc... My question is, how do you handle these issues? Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc? By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages? I hope this makes sense. Regards, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0