How often should you do a link audit and disavow?
-
Howdy Moz Fans! (Said as I twirl my non-existent mustache... damn you Rand and your cool 'stache"..!!)
So I am wondering, how often should one go through and do a link audit? The last time that I really went through a link audit was 8-12 months ago (actually, looking at my disavow upload it was Jan 2015). Is it time that I do another full scale audit of my backlinks?
-
Hi Marie! Thank you so much for your reply and I think what you have outlined makes perfect sense! We have never engaged in shady link building but didn't want to just overlook the fact that unnatural links can be built even without directly engaging in blackhat stuff! Since it has been 12 months (more or less), I will go ahead with an audit and make sure we are still on the right track!
-
Great answer! As an example, we have had issues on a site with negative link building from competitors and update 1x to 2x a year.
-
The answer to this depends on what kind of a link profile you have.
I have some clients for whom I do monthly disavows. These are sites that had a long history of unnatural link building and even though they're not currently building links, there are a lot of old links that keep surfacing.
For others I do a quarterly link audit and disavow. These are great for two reasons. One is that we keep the link profile clean but the other reason is that we get to see what new links are pointing to the site. I am often able to catch problem areas. For example, perhaps a new team member has started to venture on a link building tactic that's a little on the grey side. But in other cases, I can point out the really good links that they are getting and advise on doing more outreach to that content or perhaps building similar content.
If you are a regular site that has not been overly involved in low quality link building in the past and are not in a competitive space where you're really worried about negative SEO, then reviewing your links every 6-12 months is probably good.
-
Hi,
I'd take caution, provided you haven't built any shady linking yourself. I would never recommend disavowing links which have been built naturally even if they are from somewhat unrelated websites, unless they are spam or seem maliciously built. Also, you should try to remove the problem links before you disavow them- read this post for some useful tips!
Hope this helps,
Zoe -
I think there is no right way of going about it. If you really think that you have been attacked by people who are building shady links back to your profile, you defiantly should update your disavow link more frequently to tell Google that these following links are not built by you and you don’t want these links to pass a link juice to your website.
If you have built some kind of links that you later realize are shady, then you should immediately update the link disavow file accordingly.
But you are building links as per the given guidelines, you see no abnormal behavior on traffic, rankings and links (OSE or Ahrefs.com can tell you that) in that case you don’t really need to update your disavow file from time to time.
Just a thought.
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
-
Inbound link is follow link but we put no follow link back - is it beneficial for rankings?
Dear Moz Community, We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us. Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link. But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links. My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow. Thanks for help!
Link Building | | advertisingcloud0 -
Internal Links - First Link Rule Confusion
Hello All - I would like to create a guide for my team of rules for internal links and I could use some help. My understanding is that Google only counts the first link to a page, so any crafted keyword text links within the content do not count if the page in question is linked to from the main navigation. Is this correct? For example, if the menu or drop down menu in main site nav (which exists on all pages of the site) includes a link to a particular section that will be the only one that ever counts since the menu is on every page? Example: let's say a website selling cat toys includes a drop down menu on the homepage with links to "holiday cat toys". Does this mean that no other text links in content on the site will support that page from an SEO perspective since the link is in the main nav and will always be the first one counted? In the past we have added text links in the content on the homepage to important pages on the site. It seems to work, though now I'm questing these tactics based on the first link rule. I would appreciate some advice, clarification, thoughts, etc. Thanks!
Link Building | | JBMediaGroup0 -
Should i disavow all backlinks?
I am facing a decline in my website over the past 90 days Im wondering if this is due to the recent penguin update. Can someone please give me some guidance? heres my site: USDALoanagency.com
Link Building | | briananglin0 -
Link building
I keep sending personal emails to website asking for a link form them but every one says no how do other website get so many links to there website whats the best software to use
Link Building | | homesandindustrial0 -
What would you do about dead inbound links?
Hey guys, I recently asked a question similar to this, but wanted to spark up a bit of a discussion around it to see what everyone's feelings were on it. The web is always changing - as we're all too aware - so links you may have obtained (by however means) let's say 2 years ago may not be 'active' now. By that I mean you may have had a link from "example_-website.com" in 2010 and now "example-_website.com" is no longer an active website - but still shows a parked domain. The thing is... this parked domain is still cropping up in OSE, suggesting that Google may still believe there's a link there - and may not have re-crawled that site to prove otherwise. The issue I've had with this is an SEO company built links to the sites I'm working on now (one of the sites has been penalised as a result of their link building). These links aren't 'active' anymore and when viewed on OSE, they just head straight to a parked domain with no visible (or in-source) link to my site. What are everyone's feelings on this? What would you all do? I'm in two minds whether to re-write a section of the website.... but I'm swaying towards creating better content and NOT re-directing the old URLs to it (just contact the decent links and ask for a change of link). Looking forward to seeing your responses and speaking to you all! Nick
Link Building | | Danapollo0 -
Links and keywords
A rather simple question, If i have a paragraph and have the words cat, dog and bird would it be a good idea to have them all linking to the same url? or is better to have them all going to different urls?
Link Building | | Vetshopgroup0 -
What to do with some good links I have?
I have some pretty strong links from relevant sources linking to the homepage of a site I deal with. The links are usually from a PR3-5 pages and display specific result about the linking site. Sometimes they come from badges. We offer several services, so sometimes the page is about one service and next time about the other. Currently all of my pages link to the homepage. Would it not be better to link to the specific product page related to the page I have? Also I can do a canonical to the service pages? Which would be best?
Link Building | | Svetoslav0 -
Social Media Links
I use a social media plugin to link my blog to my social media profiles, and there is an option to make these links nofollow. I'm not worried about losing link juice to my social profiles. Is there any advantage in this case to using nofollow?
Link Building | | waynekolenchuk0