What should I include in disavow file and/or reconsideration request?
-
My client got a manual penalty notice. Need to submit a disavow file and reconsideration request which is new territory for me. The task of contacting/disavowing 100's of sites to remove 1000's of links is a bit overwhelming.
Answers to any of these questions would be greatly appreciated.
Search console is showing 100's of hacked websites pointing to the site. Many of the incoming links showing in search console are already gone. Should I include in the disavow file or is the disavow file only for links that persist?
I have read that Google does not actually read the #remarks in the disavow file. Since its manual penalty should I include them anyway since it's possible that a human could look it over? If anyone who has submitted a reconsideration request for unnatural links can comment on their use or non use of #remarks and the result that would be very helpful.
You can tell that Google wants an effort to be made that the site owners are contacted. What is the best way to document that? In the reconsideration request?: The disavow file? or both.
-
Hey KentH – it's such a pain to deal with linking penalties, and I'm sorry you're facing that now.
Onto your problem: Google definitely prefers that you make the request of the linking website's webmaster to remove the link to your site, or at least add a "nofollow" attribute to their link (pointing to your site). That said, they understand that it's not always possible to accomplish that. Here's what I recommend:
- First, reach out to the webmaster/host of the website (you can find this by looking up their domain on WhoIs)
- Then, if they respond and have "resolved" the linking issue (either by removing the link, or adding a nofollow attribute) you can consider that link/linking root domain addressed
- If you don't get a response, or the webmaster refuses to alter their link to your site, you can go ahead and add their domain to your disavow file.
It requires a bit of patience–don't wait too long to hear back from the webmasters (I'd personally give it no longer than a week). I hope this helps!
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
-
Google disavow file
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Is it worth Disavowing 15 links?
After a few months of blogging and redoing the home page, my client moved up from #40 to #1 for terms like "baltimore office furniture", "cubicles washington DC" etc. I did not do any link building for this campaign. This week, ranks are falling like a stone, and after months at #1 we're now back to #23 and lower for these terms. For the six months prior to August, we were getting about 10 clicks from referrals each month. Half way through August, we already have 35, and they are from spammy sounding sources like "search-error.com" and "search.pch.com". (screen shot attached) Should I disavow these links? There are about 20 different sources I do not recognize (see screen shot). Thanks! 6sD3oLL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj6130 -
How to stop URLs that include query strings from being indexed by Google
Hello Mozzers Would you use rel=canonical, robots.txt, or Google Webmaster Tools to stop the search engines indexing URLs that include query strings/parameters. Or perhaps a combination? I guess it would be a good idea to stop the search engines crawling these URLs because the content they display will tend to be duplicate content and of low value to users. I would be tempted to use a combination of canonicalization and robots.txt for every page I do not want crawled or indexed, yet perhaps Google Webmaster Tools is the best way to go / just as effective??? And I suppose some use meta robots tags too. Does Google take a position on being blocked from web pages. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Site traffic/sales have plummeted
About 2 months ago we relaunched our Ecommerce store on Shopify Plus and have since seen a massive drop in traffic, sales and our most valuable pages are nowhere to be found. Also, GWT is showing that Google is indexing about half of our pages and none of the images are being indexed. We did extensive keyword research, created/implemented a keyword framework, wrote brand new category/product page content, implemented schema markup, optimized our blog content and even did link building where we got some 90+ DA links. We are literally at a loss for what is causing this. Our experience with Shopify Plus has been very poor because it doesn't even do basic SEO stuff so we've had to do a lot of workarounds to make it "SEO friendly". Has anyone else ever switched to Shopify Plus and had similar issues? Is there a silver bullet that you can think of that we are missing that could get the site being indexed/ranking again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aquatell0 -
Thoughts on Proactive Link Disavow
One of my newish hobby sites has began to attract some crappy links - as per Google Webmaster Tools, Links To Your Site report. The typical .ru and .pl kind of crap that seems to seep into all somewhat successful sites' link profiles. I have not received any notifications or penalties, BUT I am considering proactively disavowing these, but wanted to bounce this idea off some other SEOs before proceeding. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David_ODonnell0 -
Disavowal & Reconsideration request - Can I do one without the other?
I submitted a link disavowal file for a client a few weeks ago and before doing that I read up on how to properly use the tool. My understanding is that if you received a manual penalty then you need to submit a reconsideration request after cleaning up links. We didn't receive a penalty so I didn't submit one. I'm wondering if anyone has used the tool (not stemming from a penalty) and if you did or didn't submit a recon. request, and what the results were. I've read that if a site is hit algorithmically, then filing a recon request won't help. Should I just do it anyway? Would be great to hear from anyone who has gone through a similar situation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vanessa120 -
Google Reconsideration - Denied for the Third Time
I have been in the process of trying to get past a "link scheme" penalty for just over a year. I took on the client in April 2012, they had received their penalty in February of 2012 before i started. Since then we have been trying to manually remove links, contact webmasters for link removal, blocking over 40 different domains via the disavow tool and requesting reconsideration multiple times. All i get in return "Site violates Google's quality guidelines." So we regrouped and did some more research to find that about 90% of the offending spam links pointed to only 3 pages of the website so we decided to just delete the pages, display a 404 error in their place and create new pages with new URLs. At first everything was looking good, the new pages were ranking and receiving page authority and the old pages were gone from the indexes. So we resubmitted for reconsideration for the third time and we got the same exact response! I don't know what else to do? I did everything i could think of with the exception of deleting the whole site. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Keyword/Content Consistency
My question is: If you have a keyword that is searched more when it's spelled wrong then when it's spelled right - what do you do? Do you do the misspelled word or keep true to the spelling and say oh well to SEO? Also - Along the same lines of that question: What if you have a keyword that has a - in the middle of it. For instance: website and web-site (this isn't the keyword just an example). and drupal website is searched more then drupal web-site but wordpress web-site is searched more then wordpress website. Technically website is the correct spelling and way to write it, but people put web-site (again not the case in reality - just an example).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0