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
-
Page links, header links, footer links
HI I have been hearing about links, you should keep to 100 Just look at this url http://www.powerwale.com/store/acdelco-sealed-vrla-iacdv5l--b-5ah-bike-battery/77031 and go for Recommend section, where you same product applies to different vehicles 1. im confused, should keep it or not?
Link Building | | Rahim119
2. Header links are less, Footer links are less, and in the future, we are planning to add more, will this affect SEO more than 100
i see many ecommerce sites, has menu showing many categories, more 100 categories links
3. Wht about link equity? If I have more links in header and footer page(all this will follow in the rest of pages).
4. More links in the header and footer shows that you are big ecommerce site.. Pls suggest, which is right way and go gain SEO value1 -
Internal Linking
OSE only shows me as having 24 internal links on my home page. My internal links and total links are far less than my competitors, some of whom have 1700 on a single page. My site is www.CenterCityTeam.com and an example of a competitor with far more internal links is www.McCannTeam.com. 1) How do I get that many internal links on a page and 2) do I even want to?
Link Building | | frankdefazio0 -
Multiply Sites / Back Links / i.p Address ?
Hi We are building a business that has multiple locations in multiple cities in the UK. We want to build a network of geographical based websites for each location / city we have a office in that we service. We are going to build about 50 sites (Standalone on their own domain) to cover all the main cities, and one main company site. The idea with the 50 x sites is to benefit from google local searches and a local location. With the 50 x sites they would all back link to the main website, so would they need to all be on seperate i.p address and hosting to get the back link to count? or can they be all hosted on the same i.p address? Obviously it would be useful to get 50 x back links from relevant sites we are just trying to work out the best to way to do this. Thanks for any advice
Link Building | | MikeIrwin0 -
Do links from the second page of an article pass link juice?
I have been writing for some sites with a high overall page rank and the articles are being viewed as quality by search engines as well. However, they usually put a link to my site at the very end of the article and then break the article down into two pages to increase ad revenue. It seems that I'm not getting much credit for that link even if the page has a high SEOmoz/PR score. I want to know if I am getting the benefit from these links. If not, how do I make sure I get the most bang, even if my link is on a second page of the article? Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/
Link Building | | LawrenceWatkins0 -
Is link exchange a reliable source to get back links?
I read a latest post on seomoz that _“Do not buy or exchange link with anyone who contacts you. This is completely against Google's policies and if they were to find out, you could be penalized." So I went through Google's ''Link Schemes'' and found that ''Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")'' can negatively impact a site's ranking . _ So is it the ''excessive'' link exchanging that can cause a negative impact? Exchanging links with good quality, cached sites (without excessive doing) can do good or bad? Can anyone please explain to me in detail?
Link Building | | semvibe0 -
Resource linking
Is a resource linking page a good way to build backlinks? Do I need to ask permission of the site I am linking? & If do build a resource page do I have to keep in mind keyword density rule, not to stuff too many links on page? I see one of my competitors using a "resource page" and linking to some high athority sites, (which I know they have not asked permission) b/c they are big name site, NFL, NHL, ESPN etc. Any suggestions much appreciated! Thank you!!!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Link building
Hello all ! I would love some opinions about one Link Building technical aspect from SEOs, link builders ... How important is the number of outgoing links on the page you have the opportunity to place a link ? (from a scale of 1-10 / what about where dose this factor fits overall with your check list , as important to consider as far as link building) Would you place a link on a page with 200+ outgoing external links if the page is ok (not involved in selling links, all links are related with the subject, target page, anchor text etc) or you would go with a link on a 10-15 links per page but not that 'powerful' and not that related (not spammy but more general on the subject that can contain links to some other non related resources). Eg: Option 1: www.whatever-name.com/links.html the entire domain is about x. It has 250 links in that page (in the links.html) all links on the links.html pages are somehow related / resources with x. Your link can be placed with an anchor text related with x that will target a page on your site related with x. Domain page rank : 6 (as a general indicator), Page PR, the links.html one, PR: 2 Option 2: www.some-other-name.com/x-is-so-great the entire domain is NOT about x, just the page. It has 5..10 links in that page (external links more or less related with x - but not spammy) Your link can be placed with an anchor text related with x that will target a page on your site related with x. Domain page rank : 3 (as a general indicator), Page PR, the links.html one, PR: 1 What's your best option ? Thanks !
Link Building | | eyepaq1 -
Link Ratio
Does Google (or other search engines) penalize websites if they have a too many inbound links from a single domain? (Say for instance, I have 500 inbound links, and 400 of them are from one root domain.)
Link Building | | EricVallee340