Is it good practice to update your disavow file after a penalty is removed.
-
I was wondering if you could use the disavow file by adding to it - even after your site has recovered from a partial site penalty.
As a recurring SEO procedure, we are always looking at links pointing to our Website. We then ascertain those links that are clearly of no value. In order to clean these up, would it be good practice to update your disavow file with more of theses domains.
Is the disavow file just used for penalty issues to alert google of the work you have done? (we have had penalty in the past but fine now)
Would this method help in keeping high quality links to the fore and therefore removing low quality links from Googles eyes?
I would welcome your comments.
-
Thanks -really good advice
-
Sounds good. When it comes to deciding on disavow vs removal, if you have no manual penalty, then my advice is to remove any links you actively control and then disavow the rest.
Here's more info:
-
HI Marie and thanks for your response.
Our penalty recovered about 7 months ago and we have seen a gradual increase in rankings.
However I keep finding unnatural links appearing and there are no contact details associated with these sites.
I had set in place a regular procedure to check out what's happening link-wise and I think its good practise to somehow remove these links. We can't manually get rid of them so to disavow was our next logical step. it keeps things clean but I wasn't sure if it would be shaking the Google tree!!
I will download the file and update with new spam sites.
-
In addendum to my response....
I would take pretty much anything MarieHaynes says as The Word when it come to anything relating to disavowing. She is the resident queen when it comes to penalties. She assisted me early on with some of my struggles and happens to know a lot more about this stuff than me!
-
Yes!
In almost every site for which I have removed a penalty, we keep seeing unnatural links that appear over time. Some of them may be the result of old automated link building tactics that are still replicating. Some may be negative SEO. And I think many of them are old links that just couldn't be found by the link checking tools until now.
You will likely want to do monthly disavows for some time until you start seeing that no new unnatural links are appearing.
Keep in mind that when you update your disavow you are overwriting your current file, so you need to download your file, convert it to .txt, add on to it, and then reupload it.
-
Good Morning!
The disavow tool, is a very powerful tool, and one that should, in my opinion, be used with caution. Google even hands out a warning before doing anything.
The strictly state that it should be used as a last ditch effort. My personal opinion is to only use it as that, last case scenario. If there are links that are just low-quality and not necessarily associated with your website, I personally wouldn't use the disavow.
There is no such thing as a link with no value, look at the site it's coming from, and the page it's going to. Is there anyway you could leverage potential traffic from that page?
If the links are 100% spam, and are causing you to be concerned, then I think that warrants uploading to the disavow tool.
Use the tool with caution my friend.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Homepage was removed from google and got deranked
Hello experts I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back. It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist. 4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk". Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk". At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better. Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page. After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image. Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all? For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results
Technical SEO | | Christian_T0 -
SEO best practice : HTTP to HTTPS
What's the best practice to switch from an all HTTP site to an all HTTPS site ?
Technical SEO | | Crocodesign
No changes to the site structure, just a full site switch to SSL.
Right now, the site is reachable with HTTP and with HTTPS. http://crocodesign.be --> https://crocodesign.be
http://www.crocodesign.be --> https://crocodesign.be
https://www.crocodesign.be --> https://crocodesign.be CMS : Wordpress 3.9
Server type : Apache
Preferred method : .htaccess0 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom
Technical SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Product Level 301 Redirects Best Practice
When creating a 301 mapping file for product pages, what is best practice
Technical SEO | | Bucktown
for which version of the URL to redirect to? Base directory or one
subdirectory/category path. Example Old URL: www.example.com/clothing/pants/blue-pants-123 Which of the following should be the new target URL: www.example.com/apparel/pants/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/blue-apparel/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/collections/spring-collection/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/blue-pants-123 This is assuming the canonical tag will be www.example.com/blue-pants-123. Also, if www.example.com/blue-pants-123 cannot be reached via site
navigation would it be detrimental to make that the target URL if Google
cannot crawl that naturally? Thanks0 -
Google Penalty Investigation
Hi All, I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one). My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'. Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
Has google applied some update on 12 september ??
I have a website www.Hindi-comedy.com , on 12 of Sep the traffic gradually fell from 320 clicks to 50 clicks in a day and my website ranking which was on 1st of 2nd page is now no where, has google applied some update on 12th of September, I use to rank well on keyword "Hindi comedy" but now its nowhere. Regards Gaurav
Technical SEO | | gaurav.agarwal0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Considering redirecting or canonicalization - Best Practice
Hi, I'm having a techinical problem and I would like advise on the effects this is having on my SEO efforts. My old site www.oldsiteexample.com (live for about 8 years) Directs to my new site www.example.com which is fine BUT When I type me new website into the tool bar both sides are found & do not direct to one domain; www.example.com & example.com (both the same site) What is the best practice here? Direct my new non www to my new www site considering my old website directs to the www. Advise & the SEO affects this is having my website would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0