Disavow without penalty
-
Hi fellow Mozians,
I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on.
I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm.
However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty.
This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts.This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRscIt seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution.
If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow.
Your help would be much appreciated.
Many thanks indeed.
-
Thanks for the help everyone!
-
Hi!
As others above me stated, it is perfectly fine to use disavow tool regardless to penalties, in my niches we tend to get a lot of negative SEO efforts against our sites, mostly from adult and pharmaceutical-remedies type of rubbish sites.
But again, it is a wild-wild expertise area where most of us has fixations including me
good luck..
-
Google has said you can disavow anytime, disavowing is only telling google that you want these backlinks to be nofollow and not pass any linkjuice so they wont help or harm you.
You don't need to be penalized to use the disavow tool, you merely need to have backlinks or domains to add to the disavow file.
It's common for SEOs to disavow urls / domains monthly, however most will tell you to do an audit yearly and keep up on new backlinks as they come in.
I've used the disavow tool but before I did, I did about a few weeks research into what it means to disavow and why one would disavow as well as how to properly disavow. No where did I read you only use the disavow tool if you have a penalty, especially since if you were hit by penguin you wouldn't really know, so Google had to leave the door open on that one.
-
I felt similar inasmuch as how often to disavow. My research show if you have been penalized disavow regularly, if not then annually with some monitoring is fine. Pre-Emptive disavow seems slightly proactive, I only disavow 3 to 5 bad links after 6 months.
Hope this helped
KJr
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.
I have a client who's site was hacked. The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists. We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected. We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms). There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned. In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists. Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalimpulse0 -
What do you think about this links? Toxic or don't? disavow?
Hi, we are now involved in a google penalty issue (artificial links – global – all links). We were very surprised, cause we only have 300 links more less, and most of those links are from stats sites, some are malware (we are trying to fight against that), and other ones are article portals. We have created a spreadsheet with the links and we have analyzed them using Link Detox. Now we are sending emails, so that they can be removed, or disavow the links what happen is that we have very few links, and in 99% of then we have done nothing to create that link. We have doubts about what to do with some kind of links. We are not sure them to be bad. We would appreciate your opinion. We should talk about two types: Domain stats links Article portals Automatically generated content site I would like to know if we should remove those links or disavow them These are examples Anygator.com. We have 57 links coming from this portal. Linkdetox says this portal is not dangerous http://es.anygator.com/articulo/arranca-la-migracion-de-hotmail-a-outlook__343483 more examples (stats or similar) www.mxwebsite.com/worth/crearcorreoelectronico.es/ and from that website we have 10 links in wmt, but only one works. What do you do on those cases? Do you mark that link as a removed one? And these other examples… what do you think about them? More stats sites: http://alestat.com/www,crearcorreoelectronico.es.html http://www.statscrop.com/www/crearcorreoelectronico.es Automated generated content examples http://mrwhatis.net/como-checo-mi-correo-electronico-yaho.html http://www.askives.com/abrir-correo-electronico-gmail.html At first, we began trying to delete all links, but… those links are not artificial, we have not created them, google should know those sites. What would you do with those sites? Your advices would be very appreciated. Thanks 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
I want to Disavow some more links - but I'm only allowed one .txt file?
Hey guys, Wondering if you good people could help me out on this one? A few months back (June 19) I disavowed some links for a client having uploaded a .txt file with the offending domains attached. However, recently I've noticed some more dodgy-looking domains being indexed to my client's site so went about creating a new "Disavow List". When I went to upload this new list I was informed that I would be replacing the existing file. So, my question is, what do I do here? Make a new list with both old and new domains that I plan on disavowing and replace the existing one? Or; Just replace the existing .txt file with the new file because Google has recognised I've already disavowed those older links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Is there a way to show random blocks of text to users without it affecting SEO? Cloaking for good?
My client has a pretty creative idea for his web copy. In the body of his page there will be a big block of text that contains random industry related terms but within that he will bold and colorize certain words that create a coherent sentence. Something to the effect of "cut through the noise with a marketing team that gets results". Get it? So if you were to read the paragraph word-for-word it would make no sense at all. It's basically a bunch of random words. He's worried this will affect his SEO and appear to be keyword stuffing to Google. My question is: Is there a way to block certain text on a webpage from search engines but show them to users? I guess it would be the opposite of cloaking? But it's still cloaking...isn't it? In the end we'll probably just make the block of text an image instead but I was just wondering if anyone has any creative solutions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheOceanAgency0 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
Solving Keyword Cannibalisation WITHOUT exact match internal links
Hi guys, I have an ecommerce client I'm working with (they are a tour operator). The client has multiple variations of very very similar tours which has created a keyword cannibalisation issue. I've read this blog from Rand on the issue, and I understand that I need to use internal links to show the bots which page I want to rank for which term. Problem is, I cant use exact match anchor text as it wouldn't adequately describe the tour from a user's perspective. eg I want a single page to rank for 'Los Angeles Tour' however, because the tour also takes in san francisco, I cant use the exact match anchor text 'Los Angeles Tour' because it doesn't give users a realistic indication of the page that they are going to. My solution... Is to use the internal linking structure eg 'San Francisco & Los Angeles Tour', This has the keyword phrase I want to optimise for within the anchor text. Does this have the same effect as using the exact match anchor text? I cant really see any other solution, so I'm guessing that s the right course of action Your thoughts would be much appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjackson0