Should I disavow a particular site (no warnings in WMT)?
-
I’m currently getting a lot of external links to my website from ‘xyz’. This a series of sites with near identical content and duplicate URLs (xyz234.com, xyz63.com, xyz456.com etc). There are 15 of these sites which are contributing 6236 external links.
Would you agree that these URLs are candidates to be disavowed? I currently have no unnatural link warnings in GWT but I’m concerned with watching out for negative SEO and keeping our link profile healthy. Would pruning spammy links like these be a good step?
Any help would be appreciated!
-
Thanks all that's good advice. It sounds like this is a fairly grey area. Based on this, we've decided to run some checks on the domain first before proceeding.
-
I would, be on the safe site.. Always try and get the link manually removed also. Contact the webmaster.
Better to sort the problem at the root as opposed to putting the safety on.
-
I'm not so sure I would rush into anything without doing some research first.
Run a backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, and look at the domain authority. If the linking domain has a very high authority, and the content is not an exact duplicate, then I would leave them in place. People should use the disavow tool with care, as it can potentially do more harm then good if you are not careful.
You can also do a check for blacklisting on the linking domain, to ensure that it has a good track record.
-
Yes, disavow them. Better to be proactive and disavow now than wait for a penalty and warning to do it.
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
-
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Interlinking sites in multiple languages
I am working on a project where the client has a main .com site and the following additional sites which are all interlinked: .com site targeting US
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rachelmanning888
.com site targeting China
.HK site targeting Hong Kong All sites contain similar information (although the Chinese site is translated). They are not identical copies but being shopping sites, they contain a lot of similar product information. Webmeup software (now defunct) showed that the inbound links to the main site, from the additional domains are considered risky. Linkrisk shows them as neutral. The client wants them to be interlinked and would not want to remove the additional domains as they get a good amount of traffic. In addition, the messages and products for each country domain have been tailored to a degree to suit that audience. We can rewrite the content on the other domains, but obviously this is a big job. Can anyone advise if this would be causing a problem SEO wise and if so, is the best way to resolve it to rewrite the content on the US and Hong Kong sites? Alternatively would it be better to integrate the whole lot together (they will soon be rebuilding the main site, so it would be an appropriate time to do this).0 -
Recovering from a site migration
Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted. To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
SEO firm site audit
needs recommendation for a site audit. Post panda/ post penguin experience preferred. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skyao0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Site speed - query
When you say site speed, does it mean speed of loading of each of the pages of the website or speed of home page loading. What do site speed tools measure ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Migrating a site
Hello, I have what a I think it's a noob question.. I have a medium size website and need to put it into maintenance for the next 2 months, and afterwards activate a completly new site. My client asked me to do this, cause the same people whoe run the constant flow of information on the site, are the ones who are going to develop the new site, so he wants to just close it out So... what are the steps for doing this with minimum impact on any SEO advances made this past months?.. How do I tell the search engines, Hey, just under maintenance for a while....then... i'm back in the game but this is my new structure. and the old one should go here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0