Disavow without penalty
-
Hi fellow Mozians,
I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on.
I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm.
However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty.
This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts.This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRscIt seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution.
If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow.
Your help would be much appreciated.
Many thanks indeed.
-
Thanks for the help everyone!
-
Hi!
As others above me stated, it is perfectly fine to use disavow tool regardless to penalties, in my niches we tend to get a lot of negative SEO efforts against our sites, mostly from adult and pharmaceutical-remedies type of rubbish sites.
But again, it is a wild-wild expertise area where most of us has fixations
including me
good luck..
-
Google has said you can disavow anytime, disavowing is only telling google that you want these backlinks to be nofollow and not pass any linkjuice so they wont help or harm you.
You don't need to be penalized to use the disavow tool, you merely need to have backlinks or domains to add to the disavow file.
It's common for SEOs to disavow urls / domains monthly, however most will tell you to do an audit yearly and keep up on new backlinks as they come in.
I've used the disavow tool but before I did, I did about a few weeks research into what it means to disavow and why one would disavow as well as how to properly disavow. No where did I read you only use the disavow tool if you have a penalty, especially since if you were hit by penguin you wouldn't really know, so Google had to leave the door open on that one.
-
I felt similar inasmuch as how often to disavow. My research show if you have been penalized disavow regularly, if not then annually with some monitoring is fine. Pre-Emptive disavow seems slightly proactive, I only disavow 3 to 5 bad links after 6 months.
Hope this helped
KJr
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
-
Duplicate without user-selected canonical excluded
We have pdf files uploaded in the media of wordpress and used in our website. As these pdfs are duplicate content of the original publishers, we have marked links to these pdf urls as nofollow. These pages are also disallowed in robots.txt Now, Google Search Console has shown these pages Excluded as "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" As it comes out we cannot use canonical tag with pdf pages so as to point to the original pdf source If we embed a pdf viewer in our website and fetch the pdfs by passing the urls of the original publisher, would the pdfs be still read as text by google and again create duplicate content issue? Another thing, when the pdf expires and is removed, it would lead to 404 error. If we direct our users to the third party website, then it would add up to our bounce rate. What should be the appropriate way to handle duplicate pdfs? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dailynaukri1 -
Google disavow file
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Disavowing a .edu
I have a backlink that I found from http://onucdm.onu.edu/mt/hmlref/2010/10/see_below.html . . . it is a nofollow, so it doesn't seem to be doing much harm. But this is obviously spam. It is from a .edu, so I'm not sure what I should do. Think it's harming my site at all? In general, how do you determine what to disavow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KevinViner0 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Recovered from Manual Penalty but rankings still suck
Hi All, We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links) which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good, we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs. Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things. Does anyone have any ideas? I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was : “ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.” My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience. But still no positive result in the ranking. I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition. Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages. Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31. Can anyone help please
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
How long does a Google penalty last if you have fixed the problem??
Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'. I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this. Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty. I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BelfastSEO0