Do allow or disavow, that is the question!
-
We're in the middle of a disavow process and we're having some difficulty deciding whether or not to disavow links from Justia.com and prweb.com - justia.com alone is giving us 23,000 links with just 76 linked pages. So, to allow, or disavow? That's the question!
What do you think guys?
Thank you.
John.
-
Hey John
If you decide to take action action, then being aggressive with the links is a good approach. Both in Cyrus Shephard's great Moz blog post on the disavow tool and also advice from Google itself says if you suspect an entire domain to be spammy, go ahead and disavow all of it.
However, from my own perspective, I would only go through and create a disavow file if I knew for sure that I was suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty. I have seen very little benefit in being proactive with that tool (eg rankings are good, you spot bad links in your link profile and disavow them to be safe) and, in fact, I have seen a number of cases when a disavow was submitted "prematurely" - ie, a site was ranking fine and then disavowed some links and saw rankings fall.
If we want to look at it from a slightly skeptical point of view - if you're not suffering from a Google penalty, do you really want to inform Google that you have suspicious links in your profile?
However, that is a matter of preference based on my own experience. I would certainly take note of the links you think are bad (and perhaps put together a file ready to go, just in case). Worth noting that prweb.com has made all of its links nofollow anyway, and so as they're not passing on link equity it doesn't seem logical to then disavow them (as they have no SEO benefit) Also, keep in mind though that if you visit the page and the link is not there - and especially if you do a google search for cache:http://www.example.com and see that the cached version contains no link - there's a very good chance that the link has already been discounted anyway and so would not be flagged in a manual or algorithmic check. Seeing as you have so many links from the domains, that may be occurring.
Hope this helps
-
Has Google notified you of the need to disavow links in Webmaster Tools? Usually, there's a message about unnatural links on the Manual Actions page.
I've never preemptively disavowed links. Maybe that's wrong. But then again, no single site is giving us 23,000 links.
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
-
Taxonomy question - best approach for site structure
Hi all, I'm working on a dentist's website and want some advice on the best way to lay out the navigation. I would like to know which structure will help the site work naturally. I feel the second example would be better as it would focus the 'power' around the type of treatment and get that to rank better. .com/assessment/whitening
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
.com/assessment/straightening
.com/treatment/whitening
.com/treatment/straightening or .com/whitening/assessment
.com/straightening/assessment
.com/whitening/treatment
.com/straightening/treatment Please advise, thanks.0 -
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff. I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what? Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages. Thanks! Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
4 questions about a paragraph of SEO friendly text in my e-com websites header.
Hi guys, I'm trying to understand the SEO behind our websites header. www.mountainjade.co.nz As you can see we have a paragraph of relevant introductory text that is also SEO friendly in our header. What I would like some help with is understanding how google views and assigns 'juice' to information like this in the header or footer of a website. Usually certain pages have content specific to a given topic, and google ranks these pages accordingly. But with a websites header / footer its content appears on every page as the header is always at the top and footer at the bottom. 1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc 2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1). 3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change) 4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me. This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks team, Jake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
[Need advice!] A particular question about a subdomain to subfolder switch
Hello Moz Community! I really was hoping to get your help on a issue that is bothering me for a while now. I know there is a lot of about this topic but I couldn’t find a good answer for my particular question. We are running several web applications that are similar but are also different from each other. Right now, each one has its own subdomain (which was mainly due to technical reasons). Like this: webapp1.rootdomain.com, webapp2.rootdomain.com etc. Our root domain currently points with 301 to webapp1.rootdomain.com. Now, we are thinking about making two changes: changing to a subfolder level like this: rootdomain.com/webapp1 , rootdomain.com/webapp2 etc. Changing our rootdomain to a landing page (lisitng all the apps) and take out the 301 to webapp1 We want to do these changes mainly for SEO reasons. I know that the advantages are not so clear between subdomain/subfolder but we think it could be the right way to go to push the root domain and profit more from juice passing to the different apps. The problem is that we had a bad experience when we first switched from our first wep app (rootdomain.com) to an subdomain (webapp1.rootdomain.com) to set them equal with the other apps. Our traffic dropped a lot and it took us 6 weeks to get back on the same level as before. Maybe it was the 301 not passing all juice or maybe it was the switch to the subdomain. We are not sure. So, I guess my question is do you think it is the right thing to do for web apps to go with subfolders to pass more juice from root to subfolders? Will it bring again huge drops in traffic once we make that change? Is it worth taking that risk or initial drop because it will pay off in the future? Thanks a lot in advance! Your answers would help me a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ummaterial0 -
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Question on Moving Content
I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain). I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a). Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here. Really appreciate your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheBatesMillStore1 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0