Removing bad/poor quality links from the site
-
Sometime back my site was penalized due to unnatural artificial and deceptive links. Then we got removed the penalty by uploading file in Disavow Tool. Bad links are decreasing gradually now . What i am concerned to ask is that:
1: For how long i should wait till Google removes all the requested bad links
2:Second, i believe there are still many bad links that I dont want to keep. How to remove them now onward? Should we send Google a reconsideration request for removing the remaining bad links (site has been recovered already and no more under penalty banner)
Tanveer
-
Hi Chris you really brought some extra information, thanks for that going the extra mile.
-
Hi William and LJ Digital thanks for clarifying!
-
Just from my own experience having also been through an "algorithmic" Google penalty, it took 6-8 months after uploading a disavow file to see any recovery. But good news is it does work. I agree with the responses from William and LJD but wanted to mention Google does not remove the links you disavow. That will have to be done by submitting requests to the website webmasters. Actually Google wants you to do this first before disavow, but it doesn't seem to hurt not to or do them at the same time.
I used RMOOV as a tool to do this. Great tool and very helpful folks who will talk to you on the phone! Although disavow may get you there with Google, I think it is worth the effort to remove as many bad links as possible since it just looks bad and other search engines will not know about the Google disavow. It is a lengthy process but tools like RMOOV and Detox can help.
So no reconsideration request is required unless you have a manual action. Going forward I keep looking at my link profile using OSE, GWT and Majestic and when I see something I don't like, I update the disavow file. Important to "append" that file so as to keep all the original links and just add on the new ones.
-
-
The amount of time can and will vary from site-to-site. Using Google's disavow tool will have an effect on the links being removed over a short, staggered period of time (they may then be recrawled by Google's spiders) but the amount of time taken for the effect of the removal of these links to have an impact on your site can take a different amount of time from site to site. Usually, things will start to pick up slightly after a few weeks but it may take a few months to see the results completely kick in.
-
I'm sure that despite having your penalty removed, removing extra low quality links will have a positive impact on your site in the future. This may not be anything noticeable immediately, but it will certainly do no harm to remove or disavow extra low quality links.
-
-
The amount of time you need to wait varies widely depending on a lot of things. Google's John Muller said in a recent hangout that the disavowed links aren't all removed from the site at once. It's staggered based on when the links are recrawled and reindexed by the bots. This means you may not see a big jump after a few weeks or months, but instead gradually see improvement over time. Here is the hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxqkqGyCaI4
As to the new bad links you've found, you can continue to update your disavow file with new bad links you find, there's no need to constantly submit reconsideration requests.
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
-
Best way to check/find lost links?
Hi all As everyone, we have seen a decrease of domain authority and external links during the last months. with open site Rand is explaining the reason in this in this post, but I still would like to have a look to the links that in theory I have lost during the last months. I thought Majestic was the best option but I have been trying to get the info and I see nothing clear. When I download the fresh or history links, I only see links that are live (in theory, because in history I get a lot not existing but I can not see it without a manual check). The option of lost links is just giving me 1000 links per day, but after downloading some and checking I see that this lost link report is showing me links that are working (but it looks that majestic couldn't access when they did the crawling and show them as lost). Also the numbers of lost links are totally different if you use fresh or historic... Anyone could recommend me a good way to find out links that I really lost? Thanks
Link Building | | AutoEurope1 -
Remove Old Poor Quality Links Proactively?
I'm working with an ecommerce site where various predecessors have created 5 Wordpress.com blogs containing 5 links on each back to the site. Should I disavow those links and take down those sites if I can get access? Should I close a second YouTube channel and Google Plus account under another name set up to create links back to the site? No penalties yet. Advice much appreciated.
Link Building | | PegCorwin0 -
How can create links of our website on . edu and .gov sites?
I want to create links on .edu & .gov sites for my website . So, what kind of activities we will do for this process and how? Can you also provide list of .edu and .gov sites for create backlinks?
Link Building | | surabhi60 -
How to determine a web site is a high quality guest blogging web site?
Hi, I would like to do guest blogging on the quality web sites, the problem is how can I decide they are good quality web sites? for example: 1)ehow.com squidoo.com wikihow.com goarticles.com/ 5)articlesnatch.com all of the above are PR 4 or higher. Thanks Derek
Link Building | | derekz1010 -
Should I get these links removed?
Hi, I am trying to clean up the seo of my website. Recently stopped using a professional which might have been using grey hat tactics. I am researching, researching , researching but having trouble pulling the trigger on what I am finding. I have a couple old link exchanges going on. They are quite old. Some of them are on the footer of a website, and therefore bring in a lot of links (ie every time a new page is created). I am wondering if I should ask to get these links removed.. My link profile is pretty bad(at least according to me), nothing extremely bad, but lots of leftover of links coming from petitions, forums etc.. that I can't get removed. I have recently gotten some mention on good website but they have a way around linking directly to any website so I dont get much help from that.. If you guys need my website I can share if need be. thanks!
Link Building | | CassisGroup0 -
Remove links after Penguin?
My site did not get hit. I am worried that Google will come back and get me for those anchor-text links I built a while back. They are of low to medium quality guest posts. Should I remove my old low-quality links? What about those on sites and pages that have been deindexed by Google? Any point in removing those? I know we can only speculate at this point, but would really appreciate some opinions on this. Has the trend in the past been a slight rollback after a big algorithm update like this? Or could we expect to see more and more sites being penalized? -Mathias
Link Building | | mathiasppc0 -
List of links pointing out of my site?
What is the best way to produce a list of links pointing out of my site and the web page they appear on?
Link Building | | MiroAsh0 -
How do you determine a quality link?
I have a question about quality of links I'm seeing with my linkbuilding program. I just noticed that my 2nd ranked backlink contained the keyword as the username with a link back to my site. There was no relevant text in the comment itself with the keyword linking back to my site. My question is this good practice? I wanted to get your opinion of these kind of links for a linkbuilding program. Here's the backlink and our keyword is the username Cat Control: http://bytesizecss.com/blog/post/fix-haslayout-with-one-line-of-css. It looks like everyone posting on this page is just linking their username back to their site... I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but if everyone is doing this same type of link building on a directory type page such as this. Could these type of links eventually become a target like what happend with the farmer/panda update?
Link Building | | Woodstream0