OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site

[ThridHour]

I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752

There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary?

Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?

[ThridHour]

The site does have and has had ranking issues since the first Penguin and has really had problems the last few months. And other than some minor things low quality links are really the only problem with the site.

[JaneCopland]

Hi,

Adam is correct that the disavow tool should only be used if you think the links are causing you significant ranking problems. It's become quite common for people to disavow links without either a confirmed penalty or ranking issues, but those two factors were originally how Google recommended the tool be used.

What it sounds like has happened to your site with these bad pages is that spammers have created spam pages on the wiki then pointed links to those pages from elsewhere. It's a very common and old spam tactic, used on sites that allow UGC.

Those pages are now returning 404s, so technically the inbound links pointing to them should not hurt your website or cause a penalty. It's generally assumed the links to 404 pages (good or bad links) don't hurt or help. I disagree that they'll cause a "bad user experience" as it sounds like they have been built for spam purposes only - no one is going to try and visit these links.

If you believe these links are causing a ranking issue, the disavowal tool is certainly an option - I take it there's no chance you can negotiate these links' removal with the folks who built them? Removing links is always preferable to using disavowal also.

[Adam.Whittles]

If you are seeing zero pages indexed  and zero traffic from search then I would assume you have perhaps verified and subsequently are looking at data for the non-www version of the domain.

Double check that the site listed in WMT is www.mormonwiki.com and not mormonwiki.com. If you are looking at indexation and traffic data for the www version then there may be something else going on and unfortunately I wouldn't be able to diagnose the issue without looking at the WMT account.

Have your rankings been significantly affected? You would need to perform a fair amount of analysis before you can conclude that the site has been affected algorithmically. You would also need to be sure that any negative impact to rankings is a result of poor quality links and not something else, such as on-page factors.

Using the disavow should really be a last resort and only if it has been impossible to get troublesome links removed. As the warning from Google states, the disavow feature 'can potentially harm your site's performance' so I would not recommend using it until you have performed more in-depth analysis.

[ThridHour]

Right so if the pages no longer exist they need to be gotten rid of right? Most of these won't be removed by the webmasters and so they'll need to be disavowed right?

These pages were UGC and are essentially spam, and entirely irrelevant to anything on the site itself. So 301 redirects would not be wise or useful I don't think.

[ThridHour]

It hasn't received a manual action no. But that doesn't mean algorthimically the site isn't being affected.

So you're saying to not worry at all about these links?

They offer nothing in terms of value. If going to live pages they would be considered very spammy and completely irrelevant. But since these pages don't even exist you're saying it's unnecessary to bother with them at all?

I'm seeing the crawlability issue in WMT itself. The strange thing is that I know some pages have been indexed, we get most of our traffic organically from Google. But WMT shows zero pages indexed, zero traffic from search etc. The site has been verified as well.

[maxweb]

I agree with Adam, if the links are natural then there is no need to disavow them.

However, if the links go to pages that no longer exist then it provides a poor user experience that can harm your rankings. Think of it like having dead links on your website. Have you set up 301 redirects for the pages that have become inactive? If not, set them up and make sure to redirect the pages to relevant areas of the website (no all to the homepage). Do this and the links should pass more juice and your website's performance should improve.

[Adam.Whittles]

Are you performing a link analysis because the site received a manual action notification in WMT? If the site hasn't received a penalty then there is no need to use the disavow feature. As Google states:

'This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.'

In terms of the crawlability of the site, where are you seeing WMT reporting to have not crawled a single page? A simple site: search of the mormonwiki.com domain returns about 65,600 results and I can't see any major issues that would prevent search engines from crawling the site. However, I would probably fix the issue with the robots.txt file. Currently, www.mormonwiki.com/robots.txt 301 redirects to www.mormonwiki.com/Robots.txt, which returns a 404 error.

Hope that helps.