Disavow data for non-manual penalty
-
I'm working on cleaning link profile for a client. He has lots of crappy links pointing to his site. I tried to contact site owners so that they remove those links. No go for the most part. Since it's not a manual penalty, there's no need to specify when exactly I tried to contact those site owners, add emails to my disavow file, etc. It's my understanding that it's OK to just add domains to Google's disavow tool to submit because there was no manual action and it won't be checked by a human being. Would that be the right way to go?
-
If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed.
I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.
-
You are making the right move for the future. You can always remove something from the disavow later and it will simply be treated as a dofollow link again once the disavow file has been re-crawled and the page re-indexed. So no big deal, that process is fast if its not a crappy deep link.
There will be a Penguin update in the next few weeks according to John Mueller at Google. So any disavow effort now will be fruitless for the next update but still worth doing for the futire as the latest data sample for it has already been taken as reported by Gary Illyes here http://www.thesempost.com/penguin-possibly-next-week-late-disavow-links-next-update/
-
that's the hardest penalty to recover from lol. You never know if you have done enough.
The last time I did it (i just got one to recover recently) I just flat out disavowed all those links. I made sure I got everything, even included yandex results.
I also made "for panda only" improvements.
It worked without talking or emailing anyone.
-
Well if you believe you have an algorithmic penalty then I'd say yes. Otherwise a proactive disavow is controversial but generally seems to be thought to be fine. Of course it can effect rankings so you need to vet the links carefully. It is also possible that although you don't have a manual penalty now, you might in the future. So it is a good practice to keep the records of the removal request emails in case you will have to respond to a manual penalty. There are some great tools out there to help like RMOOV which I have used successfully.
But I'd get on that disavow quickly if I were suffering from a Penguin thing since an update could come soon.
Also it's important to know if the links were paid for or the results of a previous "SEO" company. In that case I would definitely want to keep a record of the removal emails, just in case.
Best
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
-
Should I disavow these links?
Hi all, I have a site that is a year old, we have been building backlinks organically - probably around 50 or so - then almost overnight we had100s of spammy links. Screenshot here: https://ibb.co/cijiub My questions: Should I disavow these? What happens if I don't disavow these? Can I work out where they came from? If I disavow a few of them, is this a token offering to the Google Gods that will lower my risk of being penalised? Thank you. cijiub
Link Building | | Bee1591 -
Submit new list of links to be disavowed
I had a question and I am hoping that some one on this community will be able to help clarify. We went through a link removal and disavow process last year. If we see more unnatural links showing up in our link profile and we want to disavow those links, what should be included in the new list of links that need to be disavowed: Only new links or domains Old list that was disavowed + new list that needs to be disavowed Thank you in advance for your help.
Link Building | | revenuexl0 -
Position Drop - Anchor Text Penalty
Hi - About a month ago we dropped out of all out top position ranking and now can be found around page 600 on Google for all those keywords. I feel this is because our SEO company over used or money keywords as anchor text - Could this be correct?
Link Building | | jj34340 -
Disavow Anchor and EMD
Lets say you have an legitimate EMD for a domain that is a ecommerce site with reasonable content. The site traffic was cut in half by Penguin. You think one of the main reasons that you were hit is old SEO black hat link building with Anchor that is exact match.....The catch 22 an exact match achor is the EMD. I want to disavow some of these old black hat backlinks and obviously I will nuke the ones from the spammy sites first and see what happens. What about the backlinks that have achor of emd.com (the company name and as it so happens a valid EMD) or just EMD. If the hit is coming from every single link becuase they are all exact match becuase that is the proper legit match and not some attempt to game the system......What the heck do you do? I get the War on spammy EMDs but I hope the legit ones are not hit even more. For one thing google should just have this ironic creteria for excluding EMDs....if they are running AdWords....they are 95% spam sites.....I love the irony of that one. I am betting lots of these mange to still get listed.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Can high SERPS and/or social signals minimize Google penalties and a back linking removal question
As I am continually sizing up my competition in the SERPS I have scanned their sites with a fine tooth and comb. I have found that these sites practice in the very things that I have practiced in the past and have removed thinking that may be some of the reasons I was hit with Penguin. Some of these factors are: Link Scheme with sites they own (C Blocks) Content for Search Engines (Keyword rich text) Exact anchor text in back linking profile Yet even though my competition practices in these methods (One site even places exact anchor text in the footer and header of every page for one of their other forum site) they seem to have not even been touched with any of the recent updates. In fact it seems their ranking have increased. In scanning these sites the only major difference that I have been able to see between them and I is that their SERPS are higher than mine and they have way more social signals than me. One site has about 73k facebook likes where I only have about 300. My question is Can Google ignore penalties for sites that have higher SERPS and /or social signals that would effect another site that had lower ones? My other question is related to back links My main site has links from another site I built a long time ago (Pre SEO and not knowing what I was doing) somewhere in the 73k range. Obviously a HUGE signal to Google that this might be spam and I am aware. I have removed the links from that site but unfortunately the average crawl rate per day is very low so it is taking a very long time for Google to find those pages and re-crawl them to find the links gone. Since that site I have than has those links pointing to my main site has very low traffic I am totally willing to kill that entire site with a 404. Can this help speed up the removal of those links from that site? I figure since the site no longer exists all links from that site will be removed almost immediately from my main site. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Got Google Warning But No Penalty - Should I Ask for Reconsideration?
I got the following warning from Google yesterday: "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to [...] We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. " But my website didn't lose any traffic or ranking so far. Anyway, I'm currently cleaning up my link profile. My question is, since the website didn't seem to have a penalty, should I still submit the website for reconsideration once the clean up is done? If I clean up my link profile, would that warning just go away? Should I avoid a manual review of my website? Thanks for your help.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Branded vs non branded keyword question
I have been doing a lot of research about my competitors on open site explorer and have come to see that most of them are getting a high percentage of links from branded anchor text. It is almost to the point where they are not even using any keyword terms as anchor text. I have a few questions: 1. why are they doing this 2.. how are they ranking for keyword terms when I cannot find any anchor text in their link profile that reflects their target keywords. 3. is it better for me to focus on building branded anchor text keywords than to do exact match keyword terms especially after the panda update 4. if it is better for me to focus on branded anchor text only, how do i rank for keyword terms?
Link Building | | shiftins0 -
Manual Blog Submission Services - Any Recommendations ?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could recommend a high quality blog directory submission service ? I know that the best method is to do this yourself - but the time required to do so is enourmous, so although I may manually submit to a few of the very best directories myself, I'm looking for a good quality manual service to do the rest. I'm willing to pay a decent amount to a quality submission service as I want it done as near as possible to doing it myself. Thanks for your thoughts.
Link Building | | James770
