Is There Value in Disavowing Links if you there is No Google Penalty?
-
I have just started using Link Detox to determine if our clients have links/domains pointing to their sites that could be harming them in organic search. In a few cases 7%-9% of links have been flagged as a high priority to be disavowed.
I would be interested in your opinion on the following:
-
If your site does not have a Google penalty is there an advantage to disavowing pages that have been flagged as high risk? When I go to those pages they look spammy and have no real value other than an inbound link.
-
If a client acquires another website/company and that website is now 301 redirected to the client's site, would "high risk" inbound links from the acquired company cause a problem for my client?
-
A client has taken down content from their site that was completely unrelated to their current business. Is there a benefit in disavowing those links to the old content that are deemed by Link Detox as being high risk?
Thank you,
Rosemary
-
-
I do a lot of link audits and most of the sites that I am working on do not have a penalty. Some have been suppressed by Penguin and some are sites that are trying to avoid a future Penguin hit because they've had low quality link building done for them in the past. When a site is affected by Penguin, the algorithm can act like an anchor that pulls the site down and keeps the site from ranking at their full potential. But, it's often difficult to know whether Penguin is affecting you or not because Google doesn't give you any notification or warning of the fact. As such, if there are possibly low quality links present then yes, by all means, disavow!
I want to caution you though to not rely blindly on Link Detox data. I have reviewed many disavow files that have been created after using this tool and they are horrendously inaccurate. I've seen automated link auditing tools recommend disavowing fantastic naturally earned press links from highly authoritative sites. And, what usually happens more often is that the tool classifies many unnatural links as good ones.
I think that these tools can be helpful when it comes to putting your links together in a manageable form, but you absolutely must look at each link individually. You can probably go straight to disavow for some links such as ones that come from sites that are obviously just for links such as freelinkdirectory.com or something like that. But, in most cases, a critical human eye needs to be used to look at each link and determine if it exists just for SEO purposes or has legitimate purpose outside of SEO.
So, to answer your questions:
- Yes...go ahead and disavow even if there is no penalty. But as mentioned above, manually check these links first before disavowing. And don't worry that filing a disavow is going to put you on Google's radar. That's not true.
2)Yes, a 301 redirect passes link signals to the redirected site. So, if you purchased a site that has spammy links pointing to it and redirected that site to your main site you will have spammy links pointing to the main site. You'll need to file a disavow on the main site that contains the domains that are linking to the site you purchased and redirected. With that said, if there are a LOT of spammy links, you may want to assess risk vs reward. It's possible you won't be able to find and disavow all of the unnatural links and could invite Penguin issues on the new site. If the domain is one that could get a lot of type in traffic and you really want to redirect it there are ways you can redirect without passing on any link equity such as redirecting through an intermediary page that is blocked by robots.txt.
- If the links you are asking about are now pointing at 404 pages then they are essentially removed and you don't need to disavow those links.
Hope that helps!
Marie
-
Yeah i agree with Peter, nothing wrong with being proactive in disavowing. Just be careful to make sure you not disavowing links which are helping you rank
-
Yes! There are reasons in this too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFJZXpnsRsc
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2309486/matt-cutts-use-the-link-disavow-tool-even-if-your-site-hasnt-been-penalized"If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks
like there's some weird bot that's building up a bunch of links to your site
and you have no idea where it came from, that's the perfect time to use
disavow as well," Cutts said. "I wouldn't worry about going ahead and
disavowing links even if you don't have a message in your webmaster console.""So if you've done the work to keep an active look on your backlinks and you
see something strange going on, you don't have to wait around," Cutts said.
"Feel free to just go ahead and pre-emptively say, you know what this is a
weird domain, I have nothing to do with it, and no idea what this particular
bot is doing in terms of making links, so go ahead and do disavows even on
a domain level."So - disavowing w/o Penguin is good defense tactics. Because as webmaster you know what are your good links, regular links in SearchConsole. But you can do audit on some period (one, two or three months) and checking what are new "bad" links from low-quality sites. Then just disavow them to keep linking profile good as possible.
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
-
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
Value of Outbound Links
I have read through the information on Link Building and I understand the importance of Inbound Links. Turning it on it head, how useful is it to provide outbound links on my web pages? And, do links from domains with higher domain authority get weighted higher? I have thousands of pages that I could add new articles to which I think would add value, but I want to know whether it will help for SEO.
Link Building | | troller0 -
Disavow Links - how do you know if it's worked?
I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??
Link Building | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Around 10% of our backlink profile is made up of branded links from one Japanese site, do we disavow?
We have recently changed domain names and all the links are going to the old domain. We are wondering whether we should disavow them all as they are the majority of our backlink profile at the moment.
Link Building | | cttgroup0 -
Google still allows massive link building in my country.
This is really messed up! I've been investigating this issue for almost a year now. I had discussion about this in SEOMoz before and people told me that my site was not optimized for SEO. However, I've finally come to conclusion that massive back link building is still the best way to rank in Google Turkey. Many high PR content websites do not seem to get their unique content ranked here because some shitty website can be ranked on the top by using back links with targeted anchors for the keyword they want. I've spent a lot of money for content but no it does not get listed unless I provide back links for each article. This does not happen in the US anymore. Google catches you for massive back link building and penalize you. SEOMoz authors suggest using social media more but it seems to have no effect whatsoever in Google Turkey. I really want to open a ticket for this in Google but don't know how to do it. Think about searching "urology" keyword in the US, would you see an informative website about urology or a site that contains a small article and wants to sell a bullshit product to you? If anyone knows how I can contact Google regarding to this, please let me know. Thanks.
Link Building | | mertsevinc0 -
Value of IMG links for SEO
Hello, I'm looking for some new ways to build links (IE, letitimate not spam), and I know sites featuring a site that I created would be an interesting way to do so. My question is this, the StudioPress Showcase pages http://www.studiopress.com/showcase/baltimore-print-studios link back to your site with an image, with some "Almost URL Alt text". How valuable would this link be, given that the DA is 97 and the PA is in the upper 40s Thanks Zach
Link Building | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
Linking articles to each other
I've been using white-hat article marketing to post original content about my niche to credible article directories (yes, I realize many of them were recently devalued). My question is: Is it a good or bad idea to have future articles link to older articles, as a way to increase the chances of having the older articles indexed, or increasing the amount of link juice they pass to my site (since they point to my site)? I get 2 links per article and was thinking of using 1 to point to a prior (related) article, and the other to point to my site.
Link Building | | scanlin0