Can I dissavow links on a 301'd website?
-
So we are performing link removal for a client on his old website (A), which is being 301 redirected to his new website (B). We have identified toxic links on site A and are removing, once complete we will undo the current 301, confirm a new GWT account for website A, and then submit the disavow report.
We would then like to reapply the 301 redirect to site B while we are waiting for Google to process the disavow report, the logic being we can retain some current rankings on site B while waiting for the disavow to process on site A.
Has anyone had experience with this method? I foresee some potential issues here but am interested to here from others on this. Thanks!
-
I tend to agree with Federico's concerns. If the 301 transfers a penalty, the impact could be long-term, and it could be harder to rescue site B. The short-term ranking gains may not be worth it.
Google hasn't been clear on how this operates with 301 redirects. John's suggestion to disavow on both sites seems safe. Worst case, it's wasted effort, but it's not much effort (once you've built one file, building two is easy). Still, you've got to wait for that to process, and if the algorithmic penalty is something like Penguin, then you'd have to wait for a data refresh. This could take months, so I'd be really hesitant to risk site B until you've cleaned up the mess.
Once you disavow to site A, the 301-redirect should be fairly safe, but it does depend on the extent of the penalty. The risk/reward trade-off is definitely a "devil is in the details" sort of situation.
-
Well, you are right, manual are easier to fix, although most likely, sites with manual penalties usually fall into an algorithmic penalty too.
Steps I'd suggest:
- Don't reinstate the redirect.
- Do some cleaning, extensive cleaning.
- Use it just as a redirection for users, but not for crawlers, rankings (using robots.txt disallow site A and 302 redirect the domain to site B).
Hope that helps!
-
No, this is an algorithmic penalty. Wish it was manual, would be easier to figure out.
-
But did you get any MANUAL penalty on A or B?
-
The problem is that despite the algorithmic penalty site A appears to be pushing heavy authority to site B and keeping decent rankings for some very competitive terms that we otherwise would not rank for with site B. If I remove the 301 I fully expect all current rankings to drop, I am trying to avoid this.
Were doing link removal now, but plan on having to use the disavow tool once we have a few removal requests out to webmasters. I actually got an answer on this from John Mueller at Google in the technical SEO community on G+.
John Mueller
"I would think about the final state you want to be in and just do that. If you want to do a domain move, then 301 and keep them. If you do a domain move + disavow links, then submit the file for both domains. This process will take quite some time (maybe even a year), so you don't want to play with it incrementally: just find out what you want in the end and set that up." -
Hey Chris,
Did site A or B receive a manual penalty?
As any penalty on A, which is 301'd to B, will ultimately pass the penalty to B. I would suggest removing the 301 ASAP. Then cleanup the A domain until it's clean (if a manual action, until it's revoked) and then you can think of putting the 301 back.
Removing a manual penalty could be a long process, it took 1 year for us and 4 reconsideration requests to get the penalty revoked. We had to use the disavow as a machete as disavowed almost our entire link profile leaving aside the domains that we knew were good links, all others were disavowed using the "Domain:" to avoid any missed link.
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 client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Soft 404s for unpublished & 301'd content
Hi, One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right? These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in. Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results and if so what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What can Google tell about a website from Chrome or its toolbar?
Besides crawling with a bot, what kind of info about site construction, html, etc does Google get via users via alternate methods? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945011 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Can anyone help me clean up my link profile?
Hi, I've been struggling with my rankings for some 18 months or so. It seems like the plan is to review my back links and remove or disavow the ones that could be causing my site problems. Unfortunately I neither have the time or expertise to perform this task and wonder if there are any freelancers who could work on this project? I look forward to hearing from anyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Scarce niche websites for link building
Hello! A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google. The Good: Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content. Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them. Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO. The Bad: Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric. Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time. The Something: I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords. The Ugly: I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Time sensitive: HELP! We are having a problem doing a 301 redirect.....what can we do instead?
Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects. Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect. What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page...... HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatriotOutfitters810