Should I disavow links from Dead Domains?
-
Have a new client who hired a fly-by-night backlinking company. They made 500 links from directories and 160 of these are on domains that have been deleted.
So should I inlcude the 160 dead links in my disavow?
-
I'd still disavow these because you never know when those dead domains may come back online again. There is no disadvantage to disavowing spammy directories that no longer exist other than the time it takes to do so.
With that said, however, it's not likely to make a significant difference to your rankings whether you leave these or disavow them. In the past, these spammy domains had the possibility of causing your site to be suppressed by the Penguin algorithm. But when Google released Penguin 4.0 in September of 2016, Penguin no longer demotes. It simply stops counting any link metrics from spammy links.
So why disavow? There are a few reasons:
- If you ever get a manual review of the website by the webspam team and you haven't disavowed you're at risk for getting an unnatural links penalty. You do NOT want that.
-There are other algorithms outside of Penguin that look at links. We don't know much about them, but best to be safe rather than sorry.
-Even though Google says they are simply not counting spammy links, I wouldn't want to trust their word completely and simply ignore spammy links.
-
Well, here is a thing about disavowing - it takes quite a bit of time for google to recrawl everything and apply for rankings. The sudden change in gain and drop off was what hurt you guys. I really doubt disavow would help. You can do it - no difference to you, just time spent
-
Thanks Dmitri,
Quick follow up it was 40% of the domains backlinks that appeared on these now dead domains. And all the domains were deleted in the last 60 days so Google saw a huge number of our backlinks disappear overnight. We also dropped over that period and think this might be a contributor.
So I guess that's the second side of it - if we disavow Google will no longer consider the 40% of links from dead domains. Will disavowing boost in this case?
-
Howdy.
The only reason I would suggest disavowing is when the links are coming from spammy domains. So, if those dead domains were spammy - then sure. Otherwise it'll drop off on it's own without any harm.
Hope this 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
-
We're looking at providing SEO for a website that has the majority of its incoming links from websites created solely to provide links. Few have bad spam rankings. How worried should I be about those links?
The majority of incoming links to a prospect's website are from website pages apparently created solely to provide links to the website. Few have high spam scores. The sites linking to the main site have versions of blogs with linked text. They seem to be providing positive SEO value now, but I'm concerned they might get noticed and hurt the main site in the future.
Link Building | | PKI_Niles1 -
Redirecting dofollow, high-domain-authority links from one site to another: good idea?
I have two sites that offer help for freelance writers. The first gets almost no search traffic and is very low priority for me. The second is my main priority and gets substantial search traffic. The low-priority site has a significant number of dofollow backlinks from high-domain-authority sites. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect these links to similar/related posts on my high-priority site? Would this potentially boost the SEO of my high-priority site? Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | John88990 -
When we use 'link:' for who get the link, how come google show us the same domain as a link.
the search result show the domain of its own. what is is? and is it meaningful as a link?
Link Building | | onedaykorea0 -
Internal Links - How to Increase them, Categories not being considered as Internal Links
Hi All: As per my understanding, Internal Equity Passing Links is a metric defining PA. Now my website has around 65 internal links while few of my competitors have more than 180 links. I am unable to understand how to increase the internal links passing equity on my website, because I can see, more number of links on my website than my competitors but opensiteexplorer does not show that. I am really confused. Please help out if anyone knows something about this issue. Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | sidjain4you0 -
Links from Real Estate Websites Link Page, Do or Don't?
It seems that real estate sites have at times been under heavier scrutiny from the search engines. But real estate agents get networking, which makes acquiring those links a little bit easier. Plus with localization of search, I think real estate sites may give off a good GEO scent. Should SEO's go for links from real estate websites? Does a reciprocal link devalue said links?
Link Building | | Thos0030 -
Recommended number of links on a single page to a different domain?
Hello fine SEOMOZ people, I have looked around and hope I have not missed an answer to this. The big picture: I know that when multiple links on a page point to the same external page, only the first link is considered for ranking purposes (at least for moz rank). What about multiple links on a page to (different) pages on the same external domain? The task: Using a client's network of sites to help build links (and advertise features) to the site they need optimised. The emphasis is on the usefulness of the info the the respective site's user but I am using the opportunity to create some meaningful anchor text links.The target site is feature rich and I could conceivavbly link to all the key site features (top level pages). However, my SEO spidey senses flagged the possibility that a few links on a page to the target domain (though to different pages on that domain), may carry more weight than many links on the page. I am talking about whether I can go ahead and put 10-15 links on a page to the key site features or whether I am (significantly) better off just selecting 2-5 key target feature pages and using other domains to link to the other features. Caveat: I think I am aware of all the peripheral concerns - not duplicating the page on other sites, varying the anchor text, not implementing the links all at once etc, etc.. Am I overthinking this?
Link Building | | LoweProfero-AU0 -
Is there a way to optimize our other domains for our primary domain?
Hi guys, At the moment we have our main website that is at .com We have also bought all the other domains that are available, such as: org.uk, .jp, .it, .mobi, co.nz, co.za, com.au, .cn and .eu Is there a way we can make these domains work for us a bit more? Currently they all just redirect to .com. Would it be better to put a holding page with a link to us and then a redirect on?
Link Building | | Benj250 -
Do image links with no alt tags pass link value?
"... an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines..." according to a Nov 2007 seomoz blog post. Is this still the case in 2011? I ask because I'm about to obtain a banner link on a high-traffic site (chiefly for the clickthrough value) but I notice the site uses neither "title" nor "alt" tags.
Link Building | | Jeepster0