Google launches their Disallow Tool
-
-
Hi Irving,
Today i have Compiled a comprehensive backlink report for one of my hotel client (http://www.fairfieldinnhotelcedarrapids.com/).I have identified all bad links and create one .txt file and upload via google disallow tool. now my question is, How do i know that all dead links has been removed? Is there any way to know status?
Thanks
-
If you Disavowed "good" links to your site, your rankings may be lowered as a result.
If you Disavowed "bad" links, then your Penguin issue could be reduced or resolved.
The best course of action is to allow a trained SEO professional examine each linking domain to determine if the links violate Google's Guidelines and only Disavow the links which do violate those guidelines. Also, the Disavow tool should not be used until after every possible action has been taken to remove the link. Google is quite clear on this topic. If you use the Disavow tool without "significantly" reducing the manipulative links to your site, it likely will not help.
-
I admit it... I panicked and disavowed a ton of domains that I didn't recognize as good links and I went from mid-page-2 to lower-page-3. So...my question is: what happens if I submit a new disavow file that has only a fraction of the links. Or, better yet, what if I delete the disavow file altogether with a file that has a comment saying Oops, sorry, we didn't know what we were doing with this tool and respectfully request to undo our mess".
A very good SEO told me to not chase after my disavow list, and I get what he's saying, but it's hard to not remember the days pre-disavow when I was at least on page 2 ... I was on page 1 for 14 years since 1998 until penguin hit! (I sell bean bag chairs and am speaking of serps for "bean bag chairs").
www.ahhprods.com in case anyone is curious
Thanks!
-
So far my webmaster response is about 10%, so you have no idea how much this tool can relieve some pain after so many attempts.
To the best of my knowledge, the Disavow Tool will have absolutely no impact on your success rate. It seems designed to help ensure webmasters who have a manual penalty lifted are not affected by Penguin.
-
This is gonna be interesting how everything works out.
I've sent a reconsideration request a day or two prior to the release. I will see how that request goes and then update the spreadsheet with new links I've removed as well as using disavow.
So far my webmaster response is about 10%, so you have no idea how much this tool can relieve some pain after so many attempts.
-
The damage was done before i came on the picture and there is no stats from before. the site rangs below other sites owned by the same clent with much weaker linking profiles. As i mentioend the site has the best of links, this is why i am prepared to get rid of any links that look even the slightest doggy. The site should rank number 1 when you look at the competition
I just dont have the time or budget to try to ask for removal, a attemp was made long ago with no sucess.
-
Very busy with a new project out of Arizona.
i have been following Mitt closely. He might just get over the line.
-
-
Thanks... Should have read the YouTube description.
-
This says to me that your site was spared an across the board penalty, but your rankings for specific keywords that have been overused in your anchor text have been suppressed. I would look at your incoming link anchor texts and see which one(s) you are no longer ranking for.
-
Excellent sir.
We will know pretty soon how everything shakes out once people start reporting back, but my suggestion would be that if you have a site that is not penalized you should NOT use this tool as an effort to try and clean up any spammy back links and clean up your good-to-bad backlink ratio. The reason is, this is a tool to be used as a last effort in trying to come back from a penalty when there are some links you tried to remove but simply cannot.
Sending this report will put eyeballs on your site and bring unnecessary attention to your site. Why ask Google to review your backlink profile and look at the nastiest links pointing to your site if your site is currently healthy.
An exception to this rule I think would be if you notice you are clearly under a negative SEO attack. Then it would make sense to be proactive.
-
Very solid analysis Ryan, good stuff.
-
Long time comming and quiite a messy interface. why they could not do somthing like Bing did with there tool is a mystery.
I have a client with a unatural link warning, saying "for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole"
to me this sounds like these links have been discounted anyhow and that the site is not punished, and maybe no need to do anything, but then goes on to say "If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took."
so that makes me think i do need to do something. not very clear.
This client has a lot of very good links from CNN, NYT and a host of others, but partisipated in a link wheel. The blogs in this link wheel are real blogs rather than your obvious mass made for links blogs and makes it hard to identify what are what. i am thinking to disavow anything thats could be doggy, he has such good links I think it better to have a few false positives rather then leave any bad links in the profile.
Back to my first point, i was hoping for a click and job done approch link in BWMT.
-
Nice write-up Ryan, thanks.
Looks like an aggressive tool, I can see a lot of Webmasters running into trouble with this one.
If you contact a blog to get a link removed and then realise after actually I have made a mistake, or you login to a directory and remove it yourself and realise after you have made a mistake you can work on getting it back.
I get the feeling if you don't go through the process Ryan put down and you make a mistake with the Disallow Tool you wont be able to get those links back.
-
You are so right Ryan! This tool is not a shortcut at all. I fear that a lot of webmasters who have an unnatural links warning are going to jump straight to the disavow tool and ignore the actual reconsideration request process. As Matt says in the video, you still need to make a thorough attempt at trying to get the links removed on your own in order to have a manual penalty revoked.
-
Thanks for opening this discussion Irving. I have had calls from clients today regarding this "change" and it seems many site owners are simply caught up in the idea without realizing the true impact of this change. Resolving a manual Google penalty for manipulative links involves 4 steps prior to the release of this tool:
1. Compile a comprehensive backlink report. Many sites which suffer from a manipulative link penalty are absolutely doomed to have their Reconsideration Requests declined before they are even submitted. Why? Because they have not captured all the links to their site. You cannot rely on any single tool or even 2 tool combination. For each client I work with we compile a list of every known backlink to their site. How? By combining Google + Bing + OSE + Majestic + AHREFs data. Each data source offers links the others do not seem to find.
2. Properly identify all the manipulative links to the target site. Once again, many site owners repeatedly fail their Reconsideration Request and have no real chance at success because they try to take the easy way out. Attempting to replace real effort with fake work is what caused the penalty in the first place.
a. A thorough understanding of the difference between an organic link and manipulative link is required. In short, you must calibrate your understanding of links to match Google. How do you view free directory links? The reality is 99%+ of them are manipulative. How about press releases? Do you think most press releases are organic links? When site owners pay another company to publish articles they wrote with links back to their site, does that sound natural to you?
b. How about broken links? Can you use an automatic link checker and then if the link is not on the URL simply cross it off the list? In a significant percent of cases the link has simply moved to another page on the linking site. Some sites have very dynamic link structures where one day a URL is at ?page=20 and the next it is at ?page=21. Other sites make URL changes over time. You must search each site using their search widget and a Google site: search before assuming the site's link is gone.
c. Is the link marked NoFollow? You need to keep searching the page to ensure there are not other followed links on the same page.
The above are just some examples of gaps in the process of many who attempt to resolve this type of penalty. The disavow tool's introduction does not impact this step.
3. Webmaster Outreach. Once you have a comprehensive list of all known links to your site and have properly identified all the manipulative links, there is a need to contact every site on the list. Another common issue is those attempting to resolving a manipulative link issue give up far too easy. Site owners can be contacted via their WHOIS email address, the email address on their site AND the contact form on their site. You can call them, send a letter and chase them down on social networks. This type of sincere effort can lead to 50%+ reduction in links to your site.
Once sincere and comprehensive efforts have been made to remove the links, Google can clearly tell because there will be a "significant" reduction in manipulative links. At that point, THEN the Disavow tool can be used.
4. Filing a thoroughly documented Reconsideration Request. Three days later, the Reconsideration Request can be submitted.
So the introduction of this tool actually did not reduce any step in the process at all. Matt clearly outlined Google's expectation the tool is only used after a webmaster outreach campaign has been completed. If you expect to be able to simply submit a list of links without webmaster outreach, you are likely going to be disappointed.
Watch the first 2 minutes of the video a few times. Matt clearly says "...when you have contacted each webmaster multiple times....and there are only a small fraction of links left....that is when you can use the tool."
-
Nice summary at SEWatch:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2217602/Google-Disavow-Links-Tool-Now-Available
I'm curious about the "Most sites shouldn’t use this tool,” Cutts said. “Use caution." caveat. I've basically got only one client out of many that I'd even need to consider using this for. But I can't help but imagine hyper paranoid SEOs trying to massage their link profile down to the last drop of relevance. My gut feel is that this is a 'last resort' tool, and not a 'everyday SEO' tool.
-
Based on what Matt said, it sounds like Google only wants you to use the tool for links that you've tried to remove manually but couldn't. My guess is they may ignore your disavowals if you rely too much on the tool.
-
The links are in the YouTube video description.
"Access the feature here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main" -
Cutt's did not indicate how to download the tool. Did I miss that?
-
Thanks for the heads up. Just watched the video.
-
Really looking forward to this tool... But Joeys question is Really important. Does anyone have suggestions?
-
Awesome tool. How can I tell which links to my site I should disavow? We get a bunch of random links per day that look spammy, but how can I tell for sure that removing them will help rather than hurt?
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
-
How to deal with spam heavy industries that haven't gotten the hammer from Google?
One of our clients works in the video game category - specifically, helping people rank higher in games like League of Legends. In spite of our trying to do things the right way with white hat link building, we've suffered when trying to compete with others who are using comment and forum spam, private blog networks, and other black hat tactics. Our question is - what is the right approach here from a link building perspective? Is it an "if you can't beat them, join them" or do we wait it out and hope Google notices and punishes those who don't play nice? Some test terms to see what we're up against: "elo boost" and "lol coach." Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who's dealt with a similar situation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kpaulin0 -
Google Finance Filled with Spam
Not sure if anyone else does anything with Google Finance. In the last few months, I have been noticing a lot of spam sites filling the search results in Google "ticker pages". In this example you can see 4 or the 5 top results are from the same blog network with spun low quality content.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SuperMikeLewis0 -
Google webmasters tools, Majestic and Ahref in a simple case study (Bad links and Good links)
Hey guys, This case study started from here. A simple summary, I discover that I got +1000 backlinks from Blogspot though Google webmasters tools after making a connection with owners of these blogs which points to my new blog. Before starting I proudly invite Thomas Zickell and Gary Lee in this discussion. I wish you accept my invitation. Let's go to the main point, I've used Google webmaster tools so I will start with. Then Ahref which used by **Thomas **and then Majestic which used by Gary. Take a look at "001" screenshot, you will see that Google webmaster tools discovered 1291 links points to my site. Take another look at "002" screenshot, you will find that there are 22 domains points to my site. Most of them are good links since they are coming from websites such as Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Reddit, Shoutmeload, WordPress.org, ...etc. Beside +1000 backlinks came from Blogspot.com (blogs). Also, there's some bad links such as this one came from tacasino.com Necessary to say that I've got some competitors and they nicely asked me to stop the competition for some keywords and I've ignored their request. So, I'm not surprised to see these bad links. At "002" screenshot, we can see that Google didn't discover the bad links as they discovered the good links. And they discovered a lot of backlinks which not discovered by any other tools. **Let's move to Ahref, ** I will use screenshots provided by Thomas. At "003" screenshot, you can see Ahref report that say 457 links from 10 domains. By the way, social engagements data are wrong. I got more than zero engagements .. really. At "004" screenshot, you can see domains points to my site, links with anchor text. Take a look at the second link you will find that it's a spammy link coming from PR2 home page since it's is over optimized. the third link is also a spammy link since it coming from a not-relevant website. Beside other bad links need to be removed. So, Ahref didn't discover all of my good links. Instead of that it discovered few good links and a lot of bad links. In a case like this a question come needs to be answered since there are some people trying so hard to hurt my site, Do I have to remove all this bad links? Or, just links discovered by Google. Or, Google understand the case? **Let's move to majestic, ** Gray Lee provided data from majestic which say "10 Unique Referring Domains, with 363 links, 2 domains make up a majority." Since Gray didn't take any screenshots I will provide mine. At "005" screenshot, you can see some of the bad links discovered by Majestic. Not all of them discovered by Ahref or Google. In the other hand, Majestic didn't discover all of my Good links. Also, there's a miss understand I would like to explain here. When I published the Discussion about +1000 link. Some people may think that I trying to cheat you by providing fake info and this totally wrong. I said before and I'm saying that again you are so elite and I respect you. Also, I'm preparing for an advanced case study about this thing. If any expert would like to join me this will be great. Thank you for reading and please feel free to share you thoughts, knowledge and experience in this Discussion. EE5bFNc jYg21cf Xyfgp28.png iR4UOwi.png D1pGAFO
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eslam-yosef1 -
Recovering from Google Penguin/algorithm penalty?
Anyone think recovery is possible? My site has been in Google limbo for the past 8 months to around a year or so. Like a lot of sites we had seo work done a while sgo and had tons of links that Google now looks down on. I worked with an seo company for a few months now and they seem to agree Penguin is the likely culprit, we are on page 8-10 for keywords that we used to be on page 1 for. Our site is informative and has everything in tact. We deleted whatever links possible and some sites are even hard to find contact information for and some sites want money, I paid a few a couple bucks in hopes maybe it could help the process. Anyway we now have around 600 something domains on disavow file we out up in March-April, with around 100 or 200 added recently as well. If need be a new site could be an option as well but will wait and see if the site can improve on Google with a refresh. Anyone think recovery is possible in a situation like this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xelaetaks0 -
How will Google deal with the crosslinks for my multiple domain site
Hi, I can't find any good answer to this question so I thought, why not ask Moz.com ;-)! I have a site, let's call it webshop.xx For a few languages/markets, Deutsch, Dutch & Belgian, English, French. I use a different TLD with a different IP for each of these languages, so I'll end up with: webshop.de, webshop.nl, webshop.be, webshop.co.uk, webshop.com & webshop.fr They all link to eachother and every subpage that is translated from the other site gets a link as well from the other languages, so: webshop.com/stuff links to webshop.de/stuff My main website, webshop.com gets links from every other of these domain which Open Site Explorer as well as Majestic SEO sees as an external link. (this is happening) My question. How will Google deal in the long-run with the crosslinks coming from these domains? some guesses I made: I get full external links juice (content is translated so unique?) I get a bit of the juice of an external link They are actually seen as internal links I'll get a penalty Thanks in advance guys!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pimarketing0 -
Is bad English detected by Google
Hi, I am based in the UK and in a very competitive market - van leasing - and I am thinking about using an Indian SEO company for my ongoing SEO. They have sent me some sample artilces that they have written for link building and the English is not good. Do you think that google can tell the difference between a well written article and a poorly written article? Will the fact that articles are poorly writtem mean we will lose potential value from the link? Any input would be much appreciated. Regards John J
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnnyh0 -
Keywords in Google Local results
We have a client in the moving business and I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the "local" results and the number of them that are not following Google's guidelines for Google Local accounts. 3 of them are using exact match keyword strings as their company names. I've reported all 3, every week for the last 2 months and have not seen a single dip in the rankings. Meanwhile our client has a duplicate listing we've verified and "suspended" and it hasn't changed for 4 months! Any tips? I've attached a photo of the listings as well. xwWZWyT.gif
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Impressions in Google SERP has declined from 3500 to 1600 after 5-25-2012\. Is it Penguin?
It's about the website http://www.apartments-houseboats-amsterdam.com/ The visitors had declined from 270 to 150 visitors per day. Is this caused by the Google update Penguin? If so what can I do to solve the problem? Thank you for your time and effort,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | letsbuilditnl0