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.
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
-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.
-
As Michael Edwards pointed out you need to spend some time look at the links & sites yourself to ascertain their suitability.
-
Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.
We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.
In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.
Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.
I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?
Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
"Most 503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway. " Yes if they are low quality non-human edited then yes i'd disavow.
"We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?" If ranking is impacted by a toxic link profile then disavowing only 75% of them will not recover you 75%, probably nothing.
"Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?" How long is a piece of string. The timeframe depends on how long it takes Google to crawl the toxic links.
Will this improve your rankings? I don't know is the simple answer. The best bet is to take the links on merit and disavow the ones you know are clearly toxic, manipulated etc. But soon as you mention improvement it makes me wonder if you have had a hit on organic traffic. If that is the case and it was around Sept onwards you may be looking at a broader E-A-T issue so disavowing would not resolve the bigger issue. That's pure guesswork but you get my point.
I don't know anyone who has any significant success with requesting links to be removed, other than sharks trying to charge to do so. You could argue that the 'good' sites will help, the poor sites ignore/charge, but it's a bit too much time and effort to use that signal in any way.
Mick
-
Hi Michael:
Thanks for your feedback.
Most 503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway.
We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?
Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?
Also, do you think we should reach out to these webmasters and make a written request to remove the bad links? We tried this 3 years ago and it was a total waste of time.
Thanks,
Alan -
I think the most important aspect of your question is to not trust a tool. The tool might flag domains/URLs as spam or manipulated links but the most important thing is to manually inspect each domain. I have had reports from tools where the domain in question is actually not a problem at all when inspected.
If you are getting 404, 403 or 503 error messages the links are gone. You wouldn't be penalised by Google for these because they no longer exist. There is no need to disavow because they don't exist, but you wouldn't be causing a problem if you did. The potential issue is that those header responses 'could' change back to a 200 found. I'd be inclined to monitor them at this stage and add to the disavow if the status changes. A 503 header is a maintenance response so that may come back and you would want to check what you'd be disavowing, as the link may be good.
With regard to disavowing all the links. If you have a toxic link profile you have an issue you need to address and resolve as quickly as you can, so if you determine there are 100 toxic links/domains you will want to add them to the disavow in one hit and hope that you have captured them all.
But please be aware that if some of the links are just a bit spammy/low quality then Google looks like it takes the view to ignore those links anyway.
Some things you need to manually check are:
- the relevance of the link
- the quality of the content
- the anchor text (e.g. have you got exact match, close match anchor on multiple dubious quality posts)
- the ranking of the page/domain
- the placement of the link on the page (e.g. is is a site-wide footer link).
- the quality throughout the domain
- is the link paid for but dofollow (e.g. are there signs on the site that content can be somehow 'purchased', advertorial)
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
-
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Using disavow tool for 404s
Hey Community, Got a question about the disavow tool for you. My site is getting thousands of 404 errors from old blog/coupon/you name it sites linking to our old URL structure (which used underscores and ended in .jsp). It seems like the webmasters of these sites aren't answering back or haven't updated their sites in ages so it's returning 404 errors. If I disavow these domains and/or links will it clear out these 404 errors in Google? I read the GWT help page on it, but it didn't seem to answer this question. Feel free to ask any questions that may help you understand the issue more. Thanks for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Does Link Detox Boost Work?
That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago. Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product. Sounds great doesn't it? Maybe even sounds too good to be true. Well, here is my experience with it. We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now. While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change. So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible. This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers. The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them. So we ran it and it was NOT cheap. Roughly $300. Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course. The results. No change at all. Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning. Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them. Anyone else use this product? What were your results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper2 -
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 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290