Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
-
Hello,
I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links.
I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000!
Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000.
This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
-
Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.
-
I would disavow the blogspot subdomains individually. So you'd have 1000 lines that say:
domain:subdomain-name.blogspot.com
The documentation for the disavow tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html) says the following:
Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.What we don't know, however, is if we can do a disavow:blogspot.com to get everything from blogspot. I wouldn't trust it to do this and I would definitely disavow each individual subdomain.
If you don't have a manual penalty then there is no way to upload anything other than your disavow file to Google. Your disavow file is not read by a human. It is machine processed. You simply need to trust that you have done a thorough job and then, when Penguin refreshes, if you've got a good base of good links you should see an improvement.
-
I remember G saying that you should include links you've removed in disavow as well. You can add a comment before you list all the removed links but I don't think G manually reads disavow files anyways.
Since it's algorithmic, you just need to disavow/remove all those sitewide footer links and fix your anchor profile. Check out this case study as it is very similar to your situation.
-
In my opinion, if you are going to use the main domain that is blogspot.com it will probably disavow any link that is coming from blogspot.com which means if later down the list if you get a good link from the blogspot, even it will not give you any help!
In my case, I used the sub-domains and it worked fine for me!
Hope this helps!
-
We didn't receive a penalty letter, but our traffic and search queries impression went down when there was an algorithm update with footer links.
I don't have the original list of subdomains that removed our footer links, is it really necessary for Google? I mean, can't they realize that there aren't SO MANY links coming from Blogspot anymore? And is there a section in disavow links where i can upload a list of removed links i can show Google? Or do i just state that I removed so many with a list of the subdomains in a written notice when doing a disavow (never done a disavow, so this is new to me).
THis problem won't continue either because we stopped our partnership with the blog template devloper, so anything after 2 years ago and on...we are not a part of new consumer blogs.
Looking forward to your reply and other suggestions.
-
I'm assuming you received a manual penalty letter.
I would do the separate subdomains (if this is a complete list and new ones aren't being created) since it shows more effort and won't discredit any links you get from legit .blogspot blogs. Be sure to include the domains you've successfully removed in your disavow file as well.
If this is a problem that will continue (more people will create new sites with your footer link), you might have to disavow the whole domain.
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Analyzing a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages on Magento and not getting much organic traffic to level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: Primary Keyword Target: BODY MOISTURISERS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/bath-body/moisturisers.html Primary Keyword Target: LIP MASKS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/masks/lip-masks.html Plus another 40 other URLs at level 3 with low organic performance. Authority of the domain is strong, so it's not an authority issue I believe its internal linking. Besides linking form the blog and breadcrumbs is there anything we can do to improve internal linking to these level 3 pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
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 -
Google and JavaScript
Hey there! Recent announcements at Google to encourage webmasters to let Google crawl Java Script http://www.googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html We have always put JS and CSS behind robots.txt, but now considering taking them out of robots. Any opinions on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Beastrip0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
When Google's WMT shows thousands of links from a single domain... Should they be removed?
Hi, Looking at Google's WMT "links to your site" it shows few sites that have thousands of links pointing to mine. There are actually only 1-2 links pointing to me from a site that Google shows 2000.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I assume that it is simply because they don't have canonical tags. Should I ask for the 2 links to be removed? Thanks0 -
HubPages, Squidoo and subdomains
Just want to check my thinking on something. So, Google says subdomains stand on their own right? They don't get juice from the root domain. If this is true, the subdomains on a site like HubPages or WordPress.com are essentially a PR0 domain, right? Something like, mysub.hubpages.com. But if you posted an article on Squidoo, a site that doesn't use subdomains, you should get some juice from the root domain passed to your post, right? I usually go the guest blogging route, but I recently read a couple of posts on Web 2.0 link wheels swearing they are awesome, but most of the time the recommendation is to build it using what I perceive to be PR0 sites - Wordpress.com, Tumblr, HubPages subdomains. You would have to develop those sites so they have PR in order to pass juice. Am I off base here or does building a link wheel in this way seem like a waste of time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendlymachine0