Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
-
Hello,
I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links.
I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000!
Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000.
This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
-
Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.
-
I would disavow the blogspot subdomains individually. So you'd have 1000 lines that say:
domain:subdomain-name.blogspot.com
The documentation for the disavow tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html) says the following:
Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.What we don't know, however, is if we can do a disavow:blogspot.com to get everything from blogspot. I wouldn't trust it to do this and I would definitely disavow each individual subdomain.
If you don't have a manual penalty then there is no way to upload anything other than your disavow file to Google. Your disavow file is not read by a human. It is machine processed. You simply need to trust that you have done a thorough job and then, when Penguin refreshes, if you've got a good base of good links you should see an improvement.
-
I remember G saying that you should include links you've removed in disavow as well. You can add a comment before you list all the removed links but I don't think G manually reads disavow files anyways.
Since it's algorithmic, you just need to disavow/remove all those sitewide footer links and fix your anchor profile. Check out this case study as it is very similar to your situation.
-
In my opinion, if you are going to use the main domain that is blogspot.com it will probably disavow any link that is coming from blogspot.com which means if later down the list if you get a good link from the blogspot, even it will not give you any help!
In my case, I used the sub-domains and it worked fine for me!
Hope this helps!
-
We didn't receive a penalty letter, but our traffic and search queries impression went down when there was an algorithm update with footer links.
I don't have the original list of subdomains that removed our footer links, is it really necessary for Google? I mean, can't they realize that there aren't SO MANY links coming from Blogspot anymore? And is there a section in disavow links where i can upload a list of removed links i can show Google? Or do i just state that I removed so many with a list of the subdomains in a written notice when doing a disavow (never done a disavow, so this is new to me).
THis problem won't continue either because we stopped our partnership with the blog template devloper, so anything after 2 years ago and on...we are not a part of new consumer blogs.
Looking forward to your reply and other suggestions.
-
I'm assuming you received a manual penalty letter.
I would do the separate subdomains (if this is a complete list and new ones aren't being created) since it shows more effort and won't discredit any links you get from legit .blogspot blogs. Be sure to include the domains you've successfully removed in your disavow file as well.
If this is a problem that will continue (more people will create new sites with your footer link), you might have to disavow the whole domain.
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
-
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
I've been trying to recover from a Google algorithm change since Sep 2012, so far without success. I'm now wondering if the nofollow on external links in my blog posts are actually doing me damage. http://www.smartdatinguk.com/blog/ Does anyone have any experience of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
"Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?
I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
yoast.com › Social Media
yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0
