Disavow Experts: Here's one for ya ....
-
Not sure how to handle this one. Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ...
Just a quick 3 minute video explanation: https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E
I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in.
Thanks.
-
No problem at all, happy to help. Unfortunately the best tools that we have to evaluate these are tools like Open Site Explorer which try to emulate how Google looks at links but they're imperfect for the very same reason that I can't possibly give you a definitive answer: Google doesn't want us to know!
Unfortunately, the only way we can ever know the outcome is to implement the change and see if the rankings get better or worse - welcome to the struggles of SEO!
If you really can't afford to be taking a hit right now but it would be more acceptable in a month or two (e.g. right now is your busiest period) I'd be inclined to wait. Otherwise, it's a tough call but I'd still lean toward having them removed. Don't forget that Google has been promising a Penguin (backlinks) update "very soon" all year! If that damn update finally rolls out tomorrow you may find yourself getting slammed by it... or it could roll out next year... or maybe it'll roll out and you'll be fine. Sigh.
We have had success in doing it steadily with one of our larger clients who were in a similar situation and the results were as good as we could have hoped for but YMMV. We essentially did the removal in stages. We divided the bad domains up into batches then contacted the first batch requesting removal then disavowing.
While all this was happening we also got to work building quality links to the site as well so they roughly cancelled each other out. Then we did the same thing with the other batches of bad links until we'd been through the lot.
For us, the end result was a series of fairly marginal peaks and troughs that directly correlated with link removal and link acquisition so the net position at any given time was approximately the same. I must stress though that YMMV here - since I have a total data sample of 2 domains (this client has 2 companies/sites), it's impossible for me to say with absolute certainty that what I saw is the direct result of our process.
-
Thank you so much. So that leaves the most important question. How do I know if these are benefiting me? I really can't afford to lose rankings right now, as we are in this situation due to already ruined rankings for an unknown reason. There are about 300 of them total. We have roughly 2,000 unique domains linking to us. So its a decent chunk.
Ironically their domain authority is "44" and mine is "45" .... the site has been online 16 years (with nary a design update apparently) ... their Moz domain authority is 37 whereas mine is 38. So ... I'm not sure if these guys are viewed terribly by Google or not...
There must be some way to ascertain what Google thinks of this site and its links... ?
-
The horrible thing about link removal is that it's often hard to give an accurate answer to this question. On one hand, directories, link farms etc are often ignored by search engines so having them may be doing you no harm. On the other hand, it's impossible to know if the specific domains you're looking at are actually being ignored or not.
In these scenarios I tend to lean towards having them removed anyway, just in case they are being counted. As you pointed out, there is a chance that removing them will remove some strength from your site and see you drop in rankings but since it's impossible to tell the outcome until it's too late, I'd rather risk being penalised for removing bad links than having them.
There are a few things you can do to make your life marginally easier here:
- Contact the site and ask them nicely to remove the links. They do have a phone number on the contact page, you'd be surprised how powerful a phone conversation can be vs yet another generic email.
- Export the list of referring domains (rather than links) and bulk-categorise in Excel as much as possible. Filter for words like fasthealth, seo, link, directory/directories etc and highlight them all for removal
- Disavow by domain rather than links. All you have to change in the disavow file is adding domain: to the beginning.
For example: domain:website.com.
If you do decide to give them a call or even email them, the best angle I've found is "I'm cleaning up the links in accordance with Google guidelines and have to be very picky with the ones I keep; this is no reflection on the quality of your site but I'd really appreciate it if you can remove them". Far more likely to get results than the attitude some people take of "hey scumbag, your horrible site is ruining my rankings, get rid of these spam links".
Also, the reason I say to export, evaluate and disavow at a domain level is simply a matter of volume. Rather than 20,000 spam links, you may only end up having to sift through 200 referring domains instead; far easier to manage. In my experience it's pretty rare that you'd want to disavow just one link from a site like these so doing it at the domain level disavows them all and protects you if they decide to change their URL structure in the future. A new URL structure would give you a link from a "new page" in the eyes of the search engine.
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
-
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
When rebranding, what's the best thing to do with the new domain before rebranding?
A. Do nothing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxaro.nl
B. Redirect to legacy site (current domain)
C. Create a placeholder with information about the rebranding
D. Other... What do you think is best?0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How long a domain's bad reputation last?
I catched a dropped domain with a nice keyword, but poor reputation. It used to have some malware on the site and WOT (site review tool available at Chrome among others) has very negative reviews tied to the site. I guess that Google has to have records about that as well, because Chrome used to prompt a warning when I entered the site. My question is: how long will the bad reputation last if I build a legitimate website there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zapalka0