How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
-
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file.
A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down.
I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent.
Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again.
All comments greatly appreciated.
-
As Stephen mentioned there's not an exact time frame on how quickly the changes will be seen. We at GetBackonGoogle.com submit many disavow lists for many different quality sites. Every site responds different, and it's important to continue building new, high quality links. Show the search engines you're making the proper changes and playing by their rules.
Did you try having the site remove the link, before adding it to a disavow list?
Often when you see the rankings jumping around that's a good sign. Search engines are moving your listing around to see where it fits properly. This is a great time to monitor the bounce rate and time on page. Make sure users are staying on the page and clicking through to additional pages, search engines will notice these things.
Nick
-
Unfortunately, there is no precise answer. The time taken will depend on how regularly Googlebot crawls your site, and how quickly it re-arranges the rankings for your site and in your industry. The short answer is: think weeks rather than days.
For example, if your domain is a powerful one, is frequently crawled, and has pages which rank well -- making this page something of an exception -- you could be expected to recover quite quickly. Perhaps even within a week or two. But the less these factors apply to you, the slower you can expect this process to take. Recovery will also depend on what else is happening at that time -- what are your competitors doing, how is the SERP changing, etc.
I'm sorry not to be able to give you a more precise answer. You shouldn't worry too much that three days have passed without much change. I wouldn't usually expect a full recovery within that time.
If you've done all you can with this page, raise that point with your boss if you have one. Show him/her Google's official guidance -- look right at the bottom of that page for their warning that the process takes weeks -- and move your workload towards other tasks if you can.
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
-
Google disavow file
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
CNAME record for WWW to Non-WWW Vs. 301?
I was just chatting with the person who set up our site on our domain hosting and they said they added in a CNAME record to transfer the www version of my site to the Non-www version. Shouldn't this be set up as a 301 redirect? I have hundreds of links built to the www version and only a few to the non-www version. Or Could I just add in a 301 in addition to the CNAME record? This is not my wheelhouse and need a little advice. Thanks in Advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Does Google take notice of nofollow links?
Does Google take any notice of nofollow links, they seem to count for something but don't know how much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
Any experience?1 -
Pure spam Manual Action by Google
Hello Everyone, We have a website http://www.webstarttoday.com. Recently, we have received manual action from Google says "Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." . Google has given an example http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com/. The nature of the business of http://www.webstarttoday.com is to creating sub-domains (website builder). Anyone can register and create sub-domains. My questions are: What are the best practices in case if someone is creating sub-domain for webstarttoday.com? How can I revoke my website from this penalty? What should i do with other hundreds of sub-domains those are already created by third party like http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com? . Why these type of issues don't come with WordPress or weebly. ? Regards, Ruchi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
Hello, I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords. Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc. Now my question is: 1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net? 2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this? 3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal? Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php. Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hpk0 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Google+ Local pages under review. How long does this take?
I have a couple Google+ local pages that have been placed under review. Does anyone have experience regarding the time frame of this reveiw process. Google says to give it a few weeks, but one page has been under review for four weeks now. How long should I wait for Google to review them before I delete the page and start over?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VentaMarketing0 -
Non-home page ranking higher, very odd
One of my new clients has an eCommerce site selling chair mats, that ranks first page for their primary keyword ("chair mats"), but the serp is not showing their home page... It is an odd "resources" page that mostly just has outbound links. I've never seen this. Also, there are no external inbound links to this particular page. How can this be ranking higher than the home page... weeeeird. Update: I haven't done any optimization yet... and yes, I know the site is outdated 🙂 My location is set to San Diego. If I change it (New York City), the Resources2.htm page goes away from the page 1 ranking, and I get a page 2 home page ranking. This is so strange 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0