Disavow questions

[tdigital]

Pretty sure I know the answers to these but someone asked me to make absolutely sure so here goes, any opinions welcome:

• If i disavow a whole domain does it include all sub-domains on the domain also?- my answer is clearly yes.

• If i have network of links really bad linking to my website that are already nofollow but awful websites to be linked on, is it worth putting them in the disavow list anyway to basically tell Google literally no association? I know the whole point of disavow is to essentially nofollow the link.

Opinions much appreciated, thank you guys.

[Takudzwa]

Great questions. I'll give my 2 cents based on what we've witnessed at Penalty Pros:

1 - Yes, this will do the trick. Just make sure that you are referencing the non-www version in the disavow. For example "domain:site.com" and NOT "domain:www.site.com". If you want to be super safe, just include the exact subdomains as separate line items.

2 - Google's official word is that you don't need to worry about nofollows, but we've encountered a few situations where nofollow links were pointed out as problematic in failed recon requests. This may be human error on the part of the manual team, but it's probably worth it just disavowing regardless.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[MarieHaynes]

In most cases if you disavow the root, the subdomains will be disavowed as well.  But, this may not work for certain large hosts.  If you're trying to disavow all of wordpress.com or blogspot.com you really should disavow the subdomains individually.

Regarding nofollow links, I am 99% sure that you can ignore them.  John Mueller said that you don't need to include nofollowed links in a disavow:  http://goo.gl/EhpI5O

The reason I say 99% sure and not 100% sure is because a colleague of mine was recently given a nofollowed link as an example link on a failed reconsideration request.  The site is not available on archive.org, so I can't go back and check but my suspicion is that the site may have recently changed their links to nofollow.  I have done MANY disavows and have had many successful reconsideration requests and I do not disavow nofollowed links.

[Vizergy]

I totally agree with Andy here.  PageRank is not the only metric - not by a long shot.  Any association can be negative or positive whether PageRank is passing or not.  I would disavow just to get out of the bad neighborhood.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I wouldn't take any chances with poor links, even if they are nofollowed. Even though it passes no pagerank, it is still going to be a signal that passes a message back to Google.

I never take a chance and disavow these as a matter of course. You never fully know just how much Google is using them.

-Andy

[KevinBudzynski]

According to Dr. Pete: "My understanding is that you can block the root domain that way, yes, but Google seemed to qualify that sub-domains were at their discretion. Unfortunately, we don't have much data yet. If you know that every link from the domain is bad, then I'd use the "domain:example.com" format."

Second Question--Can nofollow links hurt my site? Matt Cutts said "Typically, no unless it is abused and manual action applied."