When/ What Links to Disavow?
-
We have an older website started in 2000. We have thousands of backlinks which we believe are hurting us. Starting with Panda our site has been devastated, traffic wise, from a million + page views a month to 1/3 of that now. We've never solicited links, never paid for them, they just happened. It seems every "search engine" and spammy site on the web has links to us. Hundreds if not thousands from sites like , 29searchengines.com, 55 searchengines.net, and on and on..
1. How does a site know when the links are harmful?
2. How do you know which links should be disavowed?Thank you
-
Hi,
I'm going to answer with 2 separate and very excellent blog posts that can answer the question much better than I can:
- http://seogadget.com/link-auditing/
- http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/
There are also a number of automated tools out there link Link Detox, but a manual review is always necessary before disavowing links.
Also keep in mind that although Panda might have some backlink elements baked in as part of the algorithm, most people consider Panda to be mostly caused by on-site issues, such as duplicate content. You may want to do a bit of digging into recovering from Panda penalties, including removing thin and duplicate content, and improving on site experiences, before removing links.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Unfortunate but the truth is if you do not have many of authority links, these low quality links and directories will hurt your link profile and you might see a decline in traffic or worst case Google will manually penalize you!
How does a site know when the harmful links point back to my website? No easy game, do check your links at least on monthly basis and if you find any low quality spammy link then update the disavow file accordingly.
You can check the recent links by Open Site Explorer’s Just Discovered or Ahrefs New Links!
How do you know which links should be disavowed? Now thats a real question and a tough one! Well the easy answer to that is buy a link disavow tool like link risk or link detox and they will tell you what links are bad but as per my experience it’s not like they are always right all the time, so you should have to have some manual indicators.
Here are mine
- Links from Blog Comments (wow, what a great site… type of comments), Forum links, Press Release Links are all usually give a negative juice so this is one of the indicator, when you see these kind of link, either remove the link or update the link in the disavow file.
- Check their domain Moz trust and Google PR.
- Check their link profile and see from where they are getting links. If their link profile is nasty consider disavowing them.
- Paid Links
- Irrelevant links
Hope this helps!!
-
Panda Target content, does your website has a lot of pages with very little content? Like less than 300 words?
If you were hit by Panda you have to improve your website content. I noticed that a lot of small eCommerce websites had problems with Panda not because the site had bad content but because in Google eyes the site didn't have enough unique content.
I didn't look at your site, but my intuition says that you don't have links issue.
-
1. No notices
2. The traffic drops have pretty much coincided with Panda in 2011 and with every change they've just dropped further and further. We've not had any site changes to speak of since 2008.
3. My sense is links are one issue but I suspect there are others. -
1 - Do you have any notice on Google Webmaster?
2 - Do you see any huge traffic drop on GA? In the last year? If yes, you should check if there was any know Google update around that time. http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
ps: A big drop on traffic can be also cause by technical issues, so you should also check if your site had any big update in the time the traffic drooped. (for example a cms change)
If you dont have any traffic drop or notice on GWT, I would recommend you not disavow any link.... If you see a traffic drop you have to do a link audit and conduct a link removal campaign..
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
-
Is it a good practice to get link for your original page by shorter URL links
Hello Moz Community, I have a question regarding getting links on bitly, tiny, or an other url shortner, Is it a good practice to get link for your page by shorter url I mean lets suppose i am getting natural guest post link from content for my blog home page
Link Building | | JoeySolicitor
https://coupontoaster.com/blog/ ; and shorten it with bitly and then hyper link so is it a good practice am I getting the same power and SEO consideration as if i would have done this without url shortener. And what anchor texts shall i be using like rich anchor text or any other like click here, visit here, bitly or etc Please kindly help me with this thanks1 -
How long does it take Google to remove links after using disavow tool?
Hi guys, So we're currently in the process of removing some of the less useful and more suspect links from our profile, and used the Google disavow tool to do so. We uploaded the .txt file to the search console on 7th July this year, 2 months ago now, and according to our most recent site crawl, the suspect links are still showing up on our link profile. Do we have any idea how long this is roughly supposed to take? The ideas I've found online are conflicting - anything from 3-4 weeks to 6-9 months. Which is it? Is there any way of fast-tracking this process? Thanks!
Link Building | | rawdog0 -
Why are bit.ly and ow.ly links showing up as Inbound Links?
Hello! I noticed this question was asked a while back (around 2013 i think), but I still don't quite understand why I'm seeing these shortened URLs come up as Inbound Links? Can someone please explain? Thanks,
Link Building | | txwildcard
Carlos0 -
Subdomain links vs root domain links? Are the less valuable?
I am determining the value of links we get. Is a link on a subdomain less valuable vs one on the root domain? How less valuable would you consider a subdomain link? For example blog.site.com vs site.com/blog What other metrics would you take into consideration for the value of a subdomain link?
Link Building | | calf0 -
Linking with or without the http://
When linking from forums, blogs, or any other forms of SEO link building, should we link with or without the http://? Does google favor one more than the other or index them as two different pages? For example: | http://4wheelonline.com/ | or | 4wheelonline.com/ |
Link Building | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Link Building
Guest blogging, guest blogging, guest blogging. Since I started my career as a "brand manager" I've heard the term "guest blogging" at least a million times. So I've put a fair amount of energy into it and for a long time it worked beautifully, still is in many ways. However, in the last month or two nearly every blog I have contacted about guest blogging has said that "due to an increase in guest blogging request we are now charging a fee of x" so on and so forth. Doesn't paying for links put you at great risk for being deindexed? And can't bloggers get in trouble for this as well? Do they not know, not care or think it doesn't apply to them? And if it's a sponsored post, say I send them $100 of free product and pay them $100 to do it, isn't that just hiring someone to talk about my brand? Why would google punish me for that? Anyway around it? Thank you so much! I look forward to your suggestions/advice/criticism.
Link Building | | WNL0 -
Link building and directory links to a new site
I have three new sites all hosted on the same server in the same public html folder and each site is in a different folder inside the public html folder. These sites are a listing of live music venues in different cities in Texas. Should I link these sites together to increase page rank to each other and also put key search phrases in the anchor text and place these links in the text in the center of each page of each site to make the links more effective? Also, because the sites are about a year old they don't have many inlinks yet. If i submit them to about 50 directories will Google not like this because there are way more directory links than natural links? I've been told that it is trouble to have more than about 50% directory links compared to natural links. Thanks in advance for your answers! Take care,
Link Building | | Ron10
Ron0 -
Should I optimize/link build all my pages at once?
I'm currently starting to optimize about 30 area specific pages for a property maintenance company and was wondering, what's the best way to link build multiple pages at once? Should I link build for all of the 30 the pages at once, or maybe focus on 5 individual pages - get them ranking well, then focus on the next 5 and so on?
Link Building | | guy_andrews0