Disavow post Penguin update
-
As recent Penguin update makes quick move with backlinks with immediate impact; does Disavow tool also results the changes in few days rather than weeks like earlier? How long does it take now to see the impact of disavow? And I think still we must Disavow some links even Google claim that it'll take care of bad backlinks without passing value from them?
-
Hi Marie,
Thanks for such detailed answer.
Actually I have recently disavow a website from which 74 links are pointing to our website. So that domain must be crawled post my disavow for the impact. Right?
I wanna share our experience with related to back-links. Our global website has visitors around the globe. We been inversely ranking in India and US when we reclaimed and removed links from few domains. In more detail: We dropped in India and Improved our ranking in US when we reclaimed some back links and we dropped in US and improved in India while we removed those redirects. So it clearly mean that one or few links can trigger the algorithm that our ranking fluctuated for more than 15 positions. So such few or more suspicious back-links might be pushing us down. In this scenario, we can use Disavow undoubtedly if we know such links. We never received any manual action but not sure about manual penalty or silent penalty, but definitely we dropped post recent Penguin update where some of the back-links are real culprits. Hope I shared some useful information to you.
Thanks,
Satish
-
I don't think that anything has changed in how quickly the disavow tool works. If you put a domain or url in your disavow file, the next time Google crawls that page, they'll stop counting the link equity and the link signals that used to point to your site.
In the past, the reason why Penguin took so long to recover from is because the Penguin algorithm itself needed to be rerun in order for you to see the effects. What's changed now is that the algorithm is running in real time. So, as Google crawls the web, they do their Penguin magic.
I'm seeing a lot of people asking why they're not seeing any effects from disavowing and I think people are missing the point. The new Penguin algorithm devalues bad links but doesn't put a demotion on the site as it used to do. Disavowing a link essentially adds an invisible nofollow to the link. As such, disavowing a link that Google has already devalued is not going to help your site improve.
So why disavow at all? There are still some reasons to do so:
-
If you've got a lot of unnatural links that are not disavowed then you could be at risk for getting a manual unnatural links penalty. You do not want to risk that.
-
There could potentially be other algorithms that take links into account.
-
While we have been told that Penguin devalues rather than demotes...should we take Google's word on that? Some people are disavowing just to be sure.
Hope that helps,
Marie
-
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
-
A grade optimised posts not showing in SERPs
Hi all, I've been using Moz to research, optimise and grade a broad range of copy and blog posts over the years. After the optimisation process I've always seen a relatively quick improvement of pages/posts in SERPs. I am currently working on a new website launched earlier in the year on a subdomain. There's a sitemap, fresh content added every month and the site has an verified Google Analytics and Search Console account. The content is quite niche with low traffic data for related terms, however, I am finding that after three or four weeks the optimised posts aren't displaying in the top 50 results in Google. These are the posts: https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/cut-the-cost-of-customer-support-use-a-work-at-home-model/ - optimised for "Cut the cost of customer support" (and also "Cut the cost of customer support: use a work-at-home model") https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/quality-and-compliance-in-a-work-at-home-environment/ - optimised for "Quality and compliance" (and also "Quality and compliance in a work-at-home environment") As a new website launched on a subdomain there aren't currently any inbound links, but I wanted to know if I am simply being impatient in expecting the above posts to rank higher (if only slightly), or if there could be a reason optimised content with a Moz A grade isn't showing in the first 50 results. Any advice or pointers would be much appreciated. Jonathan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Random post plugin creates 302 redirects. What should I do?
Just started work on a great MMA news site. In their footer, they have a plugin for random posts, which creates URL strings with '?random=1' on the end and then 302 redirects to a random article on the site. I know SEO-friendly protocol for redirects is to use 301 and not any of the other 300's. However, I don't really see the need to do 301s for these because of the fact that they are random! That said, I also don't want to leave 1000s of errors that can hinder the 'crawlability' (don't judge me - that's a word :)) of my client's site. My thought right now is to noindex the urls with the '?random=1' in the string, so the spider doesn't worry about crawling those links. Not sure if that is proper code, but it seems that would be quick and effective. Is there a better way to attack this? If you know, please share with me! WP publishers who use random post plugins: have you experienced this? How did you fix it within the friendly confines of Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
How long does it take for google to update title and metadata?
I updated my site's title and description about a week ago, however for some reason it's still not reflected in google search results. Here's my site and try searching for 'shopious directory'. Any idea why this is? I tried looking at webmaster tool and it seems that google didn't have any errors. Why is it still showing the old data?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba0 -
Best practice to disavow spammy links
Hi Forum, I'm trying to quantify the logic for removing spammy links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
I've read the article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings. Based on my pivot chart results, I see around 55% of my backlinks at zero pagerank. Q: Should I simply remove all zero page rank links or carry out an assessment based on the links (zero pagerank) DA / PA. If so what are sensible DA and/or PA metrics? Q: What other factors should be taken into consideration, such as anchor text etc.0 -
Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?
Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them. Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain. Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy? Here is the breakdown of sites: Site1: Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products Site2: Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month Site3: Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days. Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching. Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day. Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead. Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category). We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page. FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there. Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related. Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience. Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them. We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now? How to fix it and make the Penguin happy? Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it: 1. Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd. 2. Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links". This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page. 3. On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals. Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall. Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there. Still thinking #2 above could be better? Any other thoughts would be great! Thanks, Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jab10000 -
What are best practices for anchor text diversification in a post-penguin world?
There is growing concern for this topic as the best white-hat tactics generally allow you to choose your own anchor text (eg. guest posting and infographics)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LaunchAStartup0 -
How to compete with duplicate content in post panda world?
I want to fix duplicate content issues over my eCommerce website. I have read very valuable blog post on SEOmoz regarding duplicate content in post panda world and applied all strategy to my website. I want to give one example to know more about it. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas Non WWW version: http://vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas redirect to home page. For HTTPS pages: https://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas I have created Robots.txt file for all HTTPS pages as follow. https://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt And, set Rel=canonical to HTTP page as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas Narrow by search: My website have narrow by search and contain pages with same Meta info as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?cat=7 http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?manufacturer=Bond+MFG http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?finish_search=Aluminum I have restricted all dynamic pages by Robots.txt which are generated by narrow by search. http://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt And, I have set Rel=Canonical to base URL on each dynamic pages. Order by pages: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name I have restrict all pages with robots.txt and set Rel=Canonical to base URL. For pagination pages: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=2 I have restrict all pages with robots.txt and set Rel=Next & Rel=Prev to all paginated pages. I have also set Rel=Canonical to base URL. I have done & apply all SEO suggestions to my website but, Google is crawling and indexing 21K+ pages. My website have only 9K product pages. Google search result: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&gl=US&q=site:www.vistastores.com&biw=1366&bih=520 Since last 7 days, my website have affected with 75% down of impression & CTR. I want to recover it and perform better as previous one. I have explained my question in long manner because, want to recover my traffic as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Blog not showing up when searching for exact post/META titles
I am working on a blog http://www.possessionista.com which is a very popular fashion blog. It is very well established with a 100% natural link profile and zero spammy stuff. The blog ranks #1 for random fashion terms like "kourtney kardashian cat eye sunglasses" and "emily maynard boots". The problem I am experiencing is that none of the actual titles of her posts or any of the content in the post results in her blog showing up if searched. EX: http://www.possessionista.com/2011/10/pippa-middletons-zip-jacket.html When you search "Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" on google her blog is nowhere to be found. Try searching allintitle:"Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" and she's nowhere to be found either. Even search "The other day, I met with my friend Kiran for our monthly mutual admiration society" on google and she's nowhere to be found even thoguh this is a unique snippet from her post. This post is already indexed and cached with the above mentioned details. i've also tested dozens of older posts as well. Same issue. You can actually do this to see a more clear picture: Do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown site:possessionista.com That will bring up her blog which means google recognizes that the phrase is in her META title. Now do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown without the site: included. She does not pop up but other people do. I did find that she had a duplicate title tag for a few weeks, but I've fixed that. Her posts used to pop up #1 when you search the title, but now obviously not. I am kind of at a loss and have tried a bunch of options with no success. Oh, one other thing is that some people do scrape her content, but only a few like maybe 10 and they've always been doing it even when she used to rank for her own post titles. Have you guys experienced this issue? Do you have any ideas of how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent0