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
-
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.
We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google. The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found. What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google? After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google. Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodneywarner0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
My company wants to set up some blogs - what's best practice in getting started from scratch?
My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc... From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated. Thanks, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Dilemma: Should we use pagination or 'Load More' Function
In the interest of pleasing Google with their recent updates and clamping down on duplicate content and giving a higher preference to pages with rich data, we had a tiny dilemma that might help others too. We have a directory like site, very similar to Tripadvisor or Yelp, would it be best to: A) have paginated content with almost 40 pages deep of data < OR > B) display 20 results per page and at the bottom have "Load More" function which would feed more data only once its clicked. The problem we are having now is that deep pages are getting indexed and its doing us no good, most of the juice and page value is on the 1st one, not the inner pages. Wondering what are the schools of thought on this one. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi0 -
Should I 301 Poorly Worded URL's which are indexed and driving traffic
Hi, I'm working on our sites structure and SEO at present and wondering when the benefit I may get from a well written URL, i.e ourDomain / keyword or keyphrase .html would be preferable to the downturn in traffic i may witness by 301 redirecting an existing, not as well structured, but indexed URL. We have a number of odd looking URL's i.e ourDomain / ourDomain_keyword_92.html alongside some others that will have a keyword followed by 20 underscores in a long line... My concern is although i would like to have a keyword or key phrase sitting on its own in a well targeted URL string I don't want to mess to much with pages that are driving say 2% or 3% of our traffic just because my OCD has kicked in.... Some further advice on strategies i could utilise would be great. My current thinking is that if a page is performing well then i should leave the URL alone. Then if I'm not 100% happy with the keyword or phrase it is targeting I could build another page to handle the new keyword / phrase with the aim of that moving up the rankings and eventually taking over from where the other page left off. Any advice is much appreciated, Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guycampbell0 -
Questions about Vittana.org's blogging contest and having bloggers use specific anchor text.
Hi All, Kenji Crosland here. I just joined vittana.org (yesterday!) to do some of the blogger outreach and content creation/link building. Although most of the links we've gotten in the past are branded links, we've decided to actively pursue anchor text links with specific keywords. If you check, you'll see that vittana has a relatively high domain authority. At the beginning of next week we'll be conducting a blogging contest with A-list celebrity tech bloggers. I don't think we'll have time to contact influencers in other areas for this contest unfortunately. When these A-list bloggers write their posts, we want them to have a link to this page: http://www.vittana.org/students To me, this seems a great opportunity to win on certain keywords we've discovered that should be easy to win and yet have a high volume of monthly searches. These are 5 word plus keywords that have over 300,000 searches per month. The students page, however, isn't optimized for those keywords. In the long run we want to win for the more difficult keyword "literacy". The word "literacy" is what we think will be a part of our new tagline: "Literacy is not enough". Because of time constraints, we won't be able to create landing pages to win for those "low hanging fruit" keywords in time for the blog contest. My question is: to what extent should we optimize the http://www.vittana.org/students page for the five word plus low hanging fruit keywords that we've discovered. I imagine if the content isn't relevant our clickthrough rates will suffer even if we do win for it (Altering our meta description is a possibility here) . Should we just try for the difficult keyword from the get go and come up with other ways to win for the low hanging fruit keywords? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vittana_seo0