Can't remove and can't disavow...
-
Wondering if anyone could help me. A client is suffering a Google penalty at the moment which is harming their performance. That said it is properly the best penalty they could have got..the site has a penalty which is stopping them ranking as high on keywords which they have been spamming links for. I say the best penalty they could have got because, other than these keywords, the site is still performing as well as before in the engines.
Have been trying to clear up the backlinks for the past couple of months and just when I think im winning I discover some 32,000 blog comments on one domain 6 weeks or so ago!! - [http://www. iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265](http://www.iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265) example url, I broke it on purpose as to not make it a backlink
With that many links i will not even try and contact the site, I put in the disavow in google that there is no way I can get these removed and explained it etc, however, they, again, rejected the reconsideration request saying they are still not happy with the links.
At a bit of a loss here. It's starting to look that the best approach will be to write off the half a dozen terms and go a little more long tail.
The site will not rank for (this is an example as would not want to give the client away) door knockers. They used to be first page but now are page four. However they remain page one for terms such as brass door knockers, cheap door knockers, chrome door knockers etc.
In WMT ranking report they have hits from 1200 words ranking in the top 5 in the past 30 days and 3000 in the top ten.
Im a considering trying to up the rankings of these words at the expense of the ones which we cannot seem to get the penalty off.
Any thoughts please.
-
What I do is work with the spreadsheets to get it down to one link per domain and then I make a spreadsheet out of that.
-
Thanks, I think that's part of the problem. We haven't noted progress as well as we could, i'll try the approach contact info for the domains, contact form etc and see how we get on. Be nice if I could get all the links in one spreadsheet but that's proving difficult due to the volume of links and the links on the research tools.
-
I hear you. However, when dealing with a manual penalty, it really doesn't matter how many of the spam links you remove. What matters most is that you have identified nearly all of the spam links that are there. Once you have done that then try to get each of them removed, and if you can't remove them then make notes in your spreadsheet and disavow. It helps if you have in your spreadsheet the email address you could find (or if you couldn't find one, just put "none found"), the whois address of the site and the url of any contact form. That shows Google that you have made attempts. Then, disavow the ones that you couldn't get removed.
On average, I tend to get only 15-20% of links removed for my clients and yet we still pass at reconsideration because we have tried. I had one site where we didn't get a single link removed because they were all on a blackhat network and there was no way of contacting any of them but I showed Google that we tried and they lifted the penalty.
-
Marie, I agree that it's not just that one domain. We have been putting the leg work in and getting a reasonable amount removed but it's just very hard to get the blog comment spam removed as site owner has not interest in changing half their site
-
Even though there are thousands of links from one domain, I can guarantee you that that one domain is not the main cause of your penalty. If you can't remove the links then add "domain:iimpact.co.uk" to you disavow file and also make note in your spreadsheet that you attempted to contact the site owner but they did not reply. You need to record your efforts in a Google Doc so that the webspam team can check to see that you are truly trying to clean up the links.
To remove the penalty you've got to address every single backlink that was self made whether that is in a comment, an SEO directory, an article, etc. You've got to try to get each link removed and where you fail then you disavow the domain.
-
Thanks for the reply, very interesting read. I have tried to disavow at domain level before but doesn't seem to have helped much. I guess this is because of the sheer volume of links on some sites, I can find over 75,000 links to the domain on just 4 websites!!!! so if i missed one or two of these out then the rejection is understanable.
The big problem seem to be facing is the sheer volume of links. The Moz toolbar is picking up 534,918 links to the site from 1,400 domains which says there are a lot of links on a few domains. Even using OSE, GWT and Majestic i'm only getting a small amount each time owing to limits in the tools.
Will give your approach a try and block almost everything and then send a reconsideration in detailing the previous failures and hope they take pity.
If it were just one link on a site that is fairly easy to remove but they must understand i cannot email a webmaster and say can you remove links from 36,000 of your pages
On a related note. How come the moz bar tells me over 500k links, Majestic tells me 50k links (the max they report) but when I run OSE it says 44 root domains and 88 links
-
I suffered a similar issue. Although I do recognize I bought links back in 2007 - 2010, we were still getting about 10 new links every day, probably from some negative SEO campaign.
Got a penalty as a "partial match" affecting "some incoming links". We worked over a year to clean the backlink profile and still every reconsideration request failed as Google returned some links that were actually discovered after we downloaded all the links from all the possible sources.
What we did to solve this: downloaded the domains from both GWT and OSE, and instead of going link by link and spending at least 2 month contacting AGAIN, we added domain:[domain-to-disavow] and did it for almost 90% of the profile. Even domains that were linking to us honestly, but could possibly be seen as spam (like a link for my own profile in a dev forum).
After sending the disavow file with about 1500 domains, we didn't wait and sent the reconsideration request, with all the previous reconsiderations and their outcome and the decision we made to give it a "last shot". 2 weeks later we received their response, Penalty Revoked.
We started seeing ranking increases from the next day.
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
-
Disavow Google Links
Hi Guys, one question from my side: When I disavow domains in the Google link disavow tool, do I have to disavow every subdomain of a main domain.....for example; I want to disavow the following (sub)domains safsad.mydomain.com hapdasd.mydomain.com skdkada.mydomain.com Do I have to disavow every subdomain solely or does it suffice if I disavow "mydomain.com" and when done also every subdomain of this main domain is disavowed too? Thank you in advance. BG
Link Building | | MihaSI0 -
Removing many pages from my site a problem?
I have to remove two blog categories from my site which amounts to about 98 pages. I will redirect the URLS to other appropriate pages on my site. Will Google rank my site different if I lose that many pages?
Link Building | | artsp1 -
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
Using Bing's linkfromdomain: operator I'm finding spam links
Hi I've recently discovered Bing's linkfromdomain: operator and have been testing it on a few of my wordpress sites which are running the DIVI theme from elegant themes These are new sites with little or no content yet I was a bit alarmed when the results showed site I definitely had not linked to eg slickdeals dot net
Link Building | | briandee
2521.gen778 dot com
9gag dot com
flowers.ftd dot com
www.jmldirect dot com
pubs.rsna dot org is this an error from the Bing linkfromdomain: operaror because when I run the domains through xenu these sites do not show Hope someone can help0 -
Disavow Links - how do you know if it's worked?
I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??
Link Building | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Removing links from blogpost inactive blogs
Hi there, I am having alot of difficulty in removing links to my domain name from .blogspot.com blogs which are inactive and i cannot contact the user. Not so great previous seo works were done and i now need to clean it up, however no idea how to get rid of these blogspot ones. As Google own it, do they have a contact form for it, where i can complain and get pages removed? Any help MUCH appreciated guys and gals.
Link Building | | pauledwards0 -
Can too many high PR links can hurt SEO
I recently accuired about 10 PR 4- 5 for my website after getting mostly PR 1-2 for the past 6 months. After a couple of day my rankings not only didn't go up, but actually went down really drasticly for many keyphrases that i used to rank at the top 3. Should i keep building those high PR links in the same fast pace, should i slow down? Or maybe i should even those out with some low PR link?
Link Building | | atohad0 -
April Fool's for Link Building
Is there a better day for link baiting than April 1st? The time has come for everyone to share their April Fool's Day link building campaigns! This is our second attempt at capitalizing on April Fools with the first attempt (2010) falling flat. http://bigfi.sh/aFd2011
Link Building | | RyanOD0