Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How often should you do a link audit and disavow?
-
Howdy Moz Fans! (Said as I twirl my non-existent mustache... damn you Rand and your cool 'stache"..!!)
So I am wondering, how often should one go through and do a link audit? The last time that I really went through a link audit was 8-12 months ago (actually, looking at my disavow upload it was Jan 2015). Is it time that I do another full scale audit of my backlinks?
-
Hi Marie! Thank you so much for your reply and I think what you have outlined makes perfect sense! We have never engaged in shady link building but didn't want to just overlook the fact that unnatural links can be built even without directly engaging in blackhat stuff! Since it has been 12 months (more or less), I will go ahead with an audit and make sure we are still on the right track!
-
Great answer! As an example, we have had issues on a site with negative link building from competitors and update 1x to 2x a year.
-
The answer to this depends on what kind of a link profile you have.
I have some clients for whom I do monthly disavows. These are sites that had a long history of unnatural link building and even though they're not currently building links, there are a lot of old links that keep surfacing.
For others I do a quarterly link audit and disavow. These are great for two reasons. One is that we keep the link profile clean but the other reason is that we get to see what new links are pointing to the site. I am often able to catch problem areas. For example, perhaps a new team member has started to venture on a link building tactic that's a little on the grey side. But in other cases, I can point out the really good links that they are getting and advise on doing more outreach to that content or perhaps building similar content.
If you are a regular site that has not been overly involved in low quality link building in the past and are not in a competitive space where you're really worried about negative SEO, then reviewing your links every 6-12 months is probably good.
-
Hi,
I'd take caution, provided you haven't built any shady linking yourself. I would never recommend disavowing links which have been built naturally even if they are from somewhat unrelated websites, unless they are spam or seem maliciously built. Also, you should try to remove the problem links before you disavow them- read this post for some useful tips!
Hope this helps,
Zoe -
I think there is no right way of going about it. If you really think that you have been attacked by people who are building shady links back to your profile, you defiantly should update your disavow link more frequently to tell Google that these following links are not built by you and you don’t want these links to pass a link juice to your website.
If you have built some kind of links that you later realize are shady, then you should immediately update the link disavow file accordingly.
But you are building links as per the given guidelines, you see no abnormal behavior on traffic, rankings and links (OSE or Ahrefs.com can tell you that) in that case you don’t really need to update your disavow file from time to time.
Just a thought.
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
-
When conducting a link building strategy does it matter the country the link is from?
We are a UK business and if we have links mostly from US based blogs and websites does this penalise us. The links are from relevant websites and topics. Should we be focusing on .co.uk sites
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing1 -
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Links on the same keyword
When is linking from one particular keyword to much. At what point could link building from one keyword be considered spam and potentially delist a site ? Is it possible for a site to be delisted for having to many links from the same keyword ? Heard linking from the website name is more important following recent changes. I try and link from a selection of 3 to 4 keywords. Thanks for your help
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0