Old Spammy Backlinks but No Manual Penalty...No Results
-
We have taken over a site in which the client had unfortunately hired an SEO consultant who bought bad comment spam links. Webmaster Tools does not show a manual penalty of any kind but clearly this was bad practice from the former "SEO" consultant. I believe we have a good structure of the completely new website we have built for the client but I am not sure of the best way to reduce any negative fallout from the previous actions.
I've read conflicting information about submitting disavow report to Google for the comment spam links. In some cases, I have read that it would be irrelevant since there is not a manual penalty. I am fairly certain rankings are being negatively effected from this action and looking for the best way to neutralize the algorithmic penalty.
Not sure if this helps or not but I use GWMT "Download Latest Links" and see that the soonest Google discovered one of these links is 4/4/2013. Most of the links were generated some time during 2012.
How do you even begin to try to reach out and have comment spam manually removed...when most of the sites that allowed the comment spam to begin with are spam sites themselves?
-
Without looking at the links specifically it is hard to speculate. Realistically the site made it through all Penguin updates unharmed. That has to say something. Disavowing the links will have a negative affect on SEO. It will take time to come back from it. It is expensive and time consuming. I would pose the options to your client and see what they decide. Pros and Cons of both options and let them decide.
-
Monica and Sheena,
Thank you for the responses.
We are working on producing new, good, quality content.
Monica, the problem is that these sites are pretty much abandoned spam sites, many of them not even in English. Finding the actual webmaster and communicating with them is a very difficullt, if not impossible task. In most cases, these spam links are in the form of comment spam.
-
Have you reached out to the Webmasters first? I know it seems silly, but it would be better than a disavow action. Refreshing the link profile would be really helpful too, like Sheena said, having high quality links from content.
I would not recommend a disavow action be the first step. I would try to remove the links first, because you can't be 100% certain that is what is causing the ranking problems for the site.
-
All good points you're making here. Unfortunately, there isn't a consensus on whether it's best to use the tool or not. I fall into the category of SEOs who disavow obvious spam/low quality links even without any manual penalty notification... I feel it's the honest thing to do & also don't like the idea of waiting for Google to really penalize the site. I then focus on creating unique, engaging, possibly long-format content pieces that the audience will love & share (building up authentic, high quality, contextually-relevant links that support on-site optimization & outnumber/overshadow any residual low quality links).
This Moz post walks through some critical steps for using the tool: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
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
-
Why is this working for a competitor? Non-relevant backlinks helping them out?
A competitor is using a weird strategy, one I know isn't legit, however it's not only helping them, but doing in with a lot of speed. I've ran their info through ahref, majestic, moz, semrush and for backlinks they have 225ish, here is their breakdown. 169 follow links from their parent distributor site ( which is located in their parent's site's footer ) and then 3 to 5 links from sites that relate to SEO, marketing, unrelated things like pocket calling article and comment spam. maybe 5 of those links are from anywhere close to a related site, and those are from spammy directories from out of country. Why would these backlinks be helping them so much, and how can I get in front of them when these craptactics are working for them? They have 250 backlinks - 25 of them are follow We have 300 backlinks - 90 are follow and from relevant sites like EPA.gov, some EDUs and related sites to our niche. Some explanations or words of wit would really be helpful here, as I feel like something isn't adding up.
Link Building | | Deacyde0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Backlinks embedded in posts or backlinks in sidebar?
What's better? A backlink to my site, embedded into a blog post/article? Or a hardlink in the sidebar? The problem with links embedded inside articles, is that when the blog linking to me, gets updated, the articles disappear from first page and I lose the link from home page. How do you deal with this? I also read this: "The best link you can get is from a site ranking #1 for the keyword you want to rank for. It would be great to have the #1 site for a desired keyword linking me even if they are a PR 0 site." Is this right? Thx in advance.
Link Building | | BloggerGuy0 -
Which is More Powerful? Content or Backlinks: Ecommerce Sales
Hello, Which do you guys think would bring in more sales: doubling the content across all category pages and top 30 products, or getting 10% more good unique root domain backlinks from broken link building? 350 products in total 50 main categories 150 subcategories. Product page content would be frequently asked questions for the product and would be added by the site owner who is an expert. Thanks.
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
How to Manually Check if Link is Follow or No Follow?
So I just got the link - yippee! When I look at the source code href line with my url I don't see the term 'no follow'. Does this mean I have a followed link?
Link Building | | Clicksjim0 -
2 backlinking questions
I've got 2 questions regarding backlinking. 1 - I recently watched a webinar saying I should never get backlinks from any sites lower than a PR 3. However, I have found some relevant websites to our niche that are lower than that. We have recently set-up a new website that currently has a PR 0. Bearing that in mind do you think it was still be good for SEO to try and get links from the lower PR sites to build up our own PR? 2 - Has anyone found out what Google thinks of gaining links from domains hosted in other countries? For example, our websites are hosted in the UK, does it look suspicious to search engines if we have links from USA or other countries? Thanks
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
Creating Backlinks On Behalf of Client
I'm on my first SEO project with a law firm. I'm at the stage where I am doing competitive backlink research on other law firms that my client gave me. I saw a blog site called typepad. It has a high domain authority so I was going to recommend to my client that they set up an account and blog away! Since it's a law firm, I am not qualified to start blogging on behalf of my client and I know they are extremely busy so now I have to "ride" my client to get busy and start creating content. I feel like I want to do more for them on the blog side to keep things going but not having a law background, probably not doable. Question: Do most SEO's do the blogging for their clients, farm it out or keep pushing their clients to do it? I also want them to sign up with articlebase but the same thing is going to happen. I have to push them to write articles. I guess this is my job? -Bob
Link Building | | Czubmeister0 -
How good is a backlink that's in the footer
Hello, The strongest site in our industry (according to domain authority and excluding wikipedia) said that they would put a sitewide link to us in their footer. We're good friends with them. It would be right next to the copyright. Our site is nlpca (dot) com The partner site is nlpu (dot) com The link will say something like "More NLP Training" with the "NLP" as the link. We're targeting the keyword "NLP" How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"? Right now we're on the 3rd page for that term. I also want to make sure that it's a white hat move. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0