Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed.
They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking.
Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)?
Thanks,
Cole
-
I'm working on a site that had a very poor disavow file in place from a previous agency. I went through the link profile with a fine tooth comb and added a bunch more domains to the file. Organic traffic has gone up over 80%.
That is not our only problem and there are other factors to work on but the cleansing is reassuring even though we know the profile is pretty thin. But again that just goes to show quality always wins over quantity.
I would say there may be a whole host of issues hampering ranking but a dirty profile is a must fix, no matter the immediate outcome. I explain to clients that I anticipate a short term fall and why to set their expectations, then anything positive is a great bonus.
-
We were under penalty for certain keywords as a result of a poor link building strategy in the past. This led us to have to use the disavow tool in a fairly broad manner. The results were pretty inconclusive though, while we certainly saw some of the keywords recover as a result, this was not in the manner that they were at before penalty and we saw the most dramatic effect on the long tail keywords.
There were instances of shorter keywords improving, though this was fairly minimal. What I would say though is that it is still better to disavow those spammy backlinks now than suffer in the long term as a result and even if there is no improvement I would not necessarily expect to see a drop as a result.
Tim
-
Very good question and this has been covered in this great moz article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
Will it help, maybe not in the short term - but if you do nothing you are running the risks of being penalised further down the line and losing all your rankings. Thats the worse case, the best case is by removing the old links your rankings increase. I would never really leave bad links, as you will always be looking over your shoulder waiting for Google to strike.
Remove them and then concentrate on getting some quality links to your site to help boost rankings.
With Google you can never really predict anything any more and you won't really know the outcome till you have removed the bad links.
Worse case: you remove the bad links and your rankings don't improve - but your no longer looking over your shoulder waiting to see if you have been hit by the next update.
Best case: You suddenly jump up in the rankings and you no longer care about the next update, you actually look forward to them, to see which off your competition has been hit.
You will probably get neither of these by removing them, you will probably see a little improvement but nothing massive and you won't have to look over your shoulder.
I know I haven't really answered your question - but even if Google was to answer this question, they would only be guessing as they can't 100% accurately say what will happen as its all machine learnt.
Andy
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
-
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Homepage not ranking for targeted keywords (established site with somewhat ok UR&DR)
Hello everyone, i have a question regarding my homepage issue. My homepage is not showing up in google search result for all the keywords except brand name. I have checked the following things to make sure my homepage is working properly. 1.The page is indexed. 2.No canonical issues 3.No robots.txt issues. 4.Ahrefs UR45 DR55 while my competitors ranking in 2nd and 3rd page have lower UR and DR Have tens of thousands of backlinks but i think most of them are legit I suspect the problem might be the hoempage has more than 70 Anchor text (Internal links) working as directory, and many of them contain the keywords we are targeting. Will that be the reason my homepage is not ranking at all? Since the google might consider it as keyword stuffing and penalize my homepage for that. What are your thoughts on this? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sufanfeiyan0 -
Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?
Hi all, I was recently doing some competitive analysis on external links/DA and came across something peculiar. A competitor of ours had their external links go from 175,179 in August to 1,141,365 in September. I've attached a screenshot showing the increase. The competitors domain authority also increased from 82 to 89 in the same time span. Has anyone else come across such a large link increase in such a short period of time, while also being rewarded for it? Obviously at first glance it seemed extremely black hat and unnatural, but I would love to be proven wrong. Thanks! Cw5tN
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
Article pages not ranking as well as they should
Hello, Our articles here are not ranking as strongly as they should. Could you take a look and tell me why? When I search for the exact article title we do not come up. We used to. Note our sitewide footer links to some articles in case that's the problem, but even articles not in the footer links aren't performing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can a Page Title be all UPPER CASE?
My clients wants to use UPPER CASE for all his page titles. Is this okay? Does Google react badly to this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petewinter0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750