Is link disavow becoming a necessary defensive strategy?
-
We have a large site which attracts a massive amount of link spam on a continual basis. I'm talking thousands of links every day. The reason we get so much spam linking to us is that we are an authority site in a highly spammed vertical.
So, to avoid falling foul of Penguin are we fast coming to a point where sites have to constantly monitor their link profiles and disavow anything that looks remotely dodgy?
-
Thanks David, some interesting comments on those posts. Normal, I would not bother with disavowing but in this particular instance the volume is at a level to cause serious concern.
-
Loss of rankings/traffic = Yes for penguin 1.0
GWT Warning = No -
Hi Jan,
I posted a similar question just the other day (http://moz.com/community/q/thoughts-on-proactive-link-disavow)
Sheldon commented on that question with a link to an interesting G+ Hangout where they touched on it slightly. You might want to check that out.
I also posted the question on G+ and got a number of replies which may be interesting to checkout:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112470203895742795102/posts/gAXXxDWMLNS
Like most things SEO, there are people on both sides of the fence. One side suggessts that you don't want touch the disavow tool unless you get a warning email (or penalty) from Googs. The other side are all for regularly, proactively disavowing junk. You may need to take all the available info into consideration and make your own judgement call.
Hope this helps.
-
Did you notice a loss of ranks/traffic? Did you get a warning message in Google Webmaster Tools for "unnatural links"? As an "authority site", the answer is probably "no". No need to use the disavow tool in my opinion.
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
-
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Disavowing Affiliate Links - Domain or Actual Affiliate Link?
Hi everyone, Hope you're all having a great day, I have a question in regards to a site which I am about to disavow. Over the past 2 months a certain page of ours has dropped from the 2nd page, all the way to the 7th. I haven't been able to diagnose why, however, yesterday I discovered that a site has been using an Lafitte link on his sidebar, the link is a do-follow. Webmaster tools indicates that this site has linked to us over 24,000 times. I understand that this link could potentially ruin our rankings - however, in terms of disavowing, what is the best approach here? Do I disavow their domain, or do I disavow the actual affiliate link also? The link is placed within an image, once the image is clicked it redirects you to another link for a second then redirects to our money site. We have got in touch with our affiliate program and they have made the link a no-follow, however, we are pretty certain this site is causing issues for us and we want to go ahead and disavow. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Disavow links established in 2009??
Sorry for the length, but I believe this is an interesting situation, so hopefully you'll enjoy thinking this one over a little. Thanks for taking the time! Historical Information We’ve owned and operated printglobe.com since 2002. In late 2009, we acquired absorbentprinting.com and operated both sites until Mar, 2015, when absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com. The reason we chose to redirect absorbentprinting.com to printglobe.com is that they were same industry, same pricing, and had a lot of product overlap, although they did have unique product and category descriptions. We saw a long and steady decline in organic traffic to absorbentprinting.com in the last couple of years leading up to the decision to redirect. By the way, while I understand the basics of SEO, neither I nor anyone else at our company could be considered an SEO practitioner. Recent Information An SEO firm we used to be engaged with us reached back out to us and noted: “I started looking through your backlink and it looks like there has been a sharp increase of referring domains.” They included a graph that does show a dramatic increase, starting around November, 2015. It’s quite dramatic and appears anything but natural. The contact from the SEO firm went on to say: “After doing a cursory review, it looks like a handful of these new links are the type we would recommend disavowing or removing.” We do little in the way of “link building” and we’re in a relatively boring industry, so we don’t naturally garner a lot of links. Our first thought was that we were the victim of a negative SEO attack. However, upon spot checking a lot of the recent domains linking to us, I discovered that a large % of the links that had first shown up in AHREFS since November are links that were left as comments on forums, mostly in 2009/2010. Since absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com in Mar, 2015, I have no idea why they are just now beginning to show up as links to printglobe.com. By the numbers, according to a recent download from AHREFS: Total # of backlinks to printglobe.com through mid-Feb, 2016: 8,679 of backlinks “first seen” November, 2015 or later: 5,433 Note that there were hundreds of links “first seen” in the months from Mar, 2015 to Oct, 2015, but the # “first seen” from November, 2015 to now has been 1,500 or greater each full month. Total # of linking domains through mid-Feb, 2016: 1,182 of linking domains first seen November, 2015 or later: 850 Also note that the links contain good anchor text distribution Finally, there was a backlink analysis done on absorbentprinting.com in April, 2013 by the same firm who pointed out the sharp increase in links. At that time, it was determined that the backlink profile of absorbentprinting.com was normal, and did not require any actions to disavow links or otherwise clean up the backlinks. My Questions: If you’ve gotten through all that, how important does it seem to disavow links now? How urgent? I’ve heard that disavowing links should be a rare undertaking. If this is so, what would you think of the idea of us disavowing everything or almost everything “first seen” Nov, 2015 and later? Is there a way to disavow at the linking domain level, rather than link-by-link to reduce the number of entries, or does it have to be done for each individual link? If we disavow around 5.5k links since Nov, 2015, what is the potential for doing more harm than good? If we’re seeing declining organic traffic in the past year on printglobe.com pretty much for the first time in the site’s history, can we attribute that to the links? Anything else you’d advise a guy who’s never disavowed a link before on this situation? Thanks for any insights! Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrintGlobeSEO0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
How to minimalise links in your footer
Hi guys, I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at. Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website. I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/ and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links. because I do found also some negative comments on this approach http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Letty0 -
Website architecture and sitewide link
Hello, I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link... I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me. What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about golf in florida that a good practicee to do that or not ? I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice. However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related ) Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
The missing link?
Hello and Welcome Moz friends! Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. On my website I've optimized our content to match the keywords I have selected for the site. I constantly am Re-writing articles, reading SEOMoz on tips and tricks how to make link juice flow. Yet only one of my keywords ranks decently, the rest never show up. I have the hardest time getting traffic to my site, and sales after that. Maybe I am implementing something incorrectly or there is something I am not doing. www.FrontlineMobility.com If you have any tips or anything to give me I would gladly accept it, any criticism is also appreciated. Thank you Friends, hopefully you can help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0