Disavow Issues
-
Hi
We have a client who was hit by Penguin about 18 months ago.
We disavowed all the bad links about 10 months ago however this has not resulted in an uplift in traffic or rankings.
The client is asking me whether it would be better to dump the domain and move the website to a fresh domain.
Can you provide thoughts / experience on this please?
Thanks.
-
Just wanted to clarify (for the sake of others who may read this post) that the question was in regards to Penguin and I think in your situation, you're dealing with manual penalties. With Penguin, there is no reconsideration request. You've got to clean up the best you can and then hope that things improve when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm.
It's still up for debate whether removing links (as opposed to disavowing) is important for Penguin. My current advice is that if a link is easy to remove then do it. But, otherwise I disavow. While you're right that it is important to show Google your efforts in regards to link removal for a manual penalty, no one is going to look at your work for an algorithmic issue.
I asked John Mueller in a hangout once whether disavowing was as good as removing for Penguin and he said, "essentially yes". However, because there are potential problems that could come up with the disavow tool (such as improper formatting or taking too long to recrawl to disavow), if you can remove the link that's not a bad thing to do.
-
Hi Paul,
I realise it's been a couple of weeks since this was submitted, but I wanted to follow up. At my former agency, we went through a few reconsideration procedures for new clients. We managed to be successful with all of them, but some took quite a long time (August - February being the longest).
We have found that disavowing alone is not nearly enough to make a difference - it is far preferable for the links to be removed. Unlike Claudio below, we have had a far higher rate than 5%, but it all depends on where the links come from. Sometimes it's hard to even find a live email address to contact webmasters, and some people want payment to remove links (worth doing if the payment is not too high). We crafted templates and _always _followed up within two weeks if we did not get a response from first emailing someone for a link removal with another specifically crafted email template.
It's true that if you cannot remove links, it is still worthwhile demonstrating to Google that you attempted to do so, with email screenshots or at least a list of the sites you contacted. They want to see effort. They want to see that you removed, or attempted to remove, the vast majority of the bad links. It's time consuming and tedious, but it's worth it if you get the penalty removed.
As I said, the longest process we went through was over six months, but the site in question had a TERRIBLE backlink profile that was the result of years of abuse by bad link builders. We're talking removing thousands of links. However, it came through - the penalty was removed and the client's rankings are on the rise.
I hope this helps. The short version is: remove remove remove. You won't maintain a penalty if there are no more bad links holding the site back, and those links aren't helping it rank anyway.
If you'd like some advice on how to decide which links to remove and which to keep, please let me know. In the meantime, check out this post from my former colleague Brandon at Ayima. It's a good resource for link analysis.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Does the site have a good base of truly natural links? There have been very few reported cases of Penguin recovery. But, the ones that I have seen recover are ones that have had some excellent links left once the bad ones were cleaned up.
-
Did you have a manual penalty? Did you get it revoked? or did you assume you had a Penguin issue and were proactive about it to avoid a manual penalty?
-
Recovery from Link Penalty (manual or algorithm) procedure:
1. Collect inboud links from Google Webmaster Tools + Moz link explorer + Link Majestic.
2. Include all domains in a Excel worksheet.
3. Contact site owners asking for link removal (usually 5% of sucess, but the effort counts for Google).
4. Wait several weeks for the removal of the links.
5. Fill a disavow file and upload it to Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1
6. Wait for 3 or 6 weeks and start a link building campain starting with a few links per week and increase it if you can (only natural links comming from authority sites related to your niche).
Recovers from Content problems.
1. Look for repetitive title and descriptions, use Google Webmaster Tools and Moz.
2. Look for pages with similar or identical content and fix it.
3. Look for pages with less than 200 words of convent and add content or simply remove them (404).
4. Add new fresh and original content.
Google will consider your effort and it will be increasing your rank step by step.
I hope it helps
Claudio
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
-
What is the process for allowing someone to publish a blog post on another site? (duplicate content issue?)
I have a client who allowed a related business to use a blog post from my clients site and reposted to the related businesses site. The problem is the post was copied word for word. There is an introduction and a link back to the website but not to the post itself. I now manage the related business as well. So I have creative control over both websites as well as SEO duties. What is the best practice for this type of blog post syndication? Can the content appear on both sites?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
I have multiple URLs that redirect to the same website. Is this an issue?
I have multiple URLs that all lead to the same website. Years ago they were purchased and were sitting dormant. Currently they are 301 redirects and each of the URLs feed to different areas of my website. Should I be worried about losing authority? And if so, is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | undrdog990 -
Bing Webmaster Tools Incompatibility Issues with new Microsoft Edge Browser
Our client received an email from Bing WMTs saying "We have identified 4 known issues with your website in Microsoft Edge – the new default browser for Windows 10 and Bing – Of the four problems mentioned, only two seem to be relevant (maybe) We’ve found that this webpage may include HTML markup that treats Microsoft Edge differently from other modern browsers. The new EdgeHTML rendering engine for Microsoft Edge is document-mode agnostic and designed for fast, modern rendering. We recommend that you implement one code base for all modern browsers and include Microsoft Edge as part of your modern browser test matrix. **We've found that this webpage may have missing vendor-specific prefixes **or may have implemented vendor-specific prefixes when they are not required in common CSS properties. This may cause compatibility problems with how this webpage renders across different browsers. Last month the client received 20K visitors from all IE browsers and this is significant enough to be concerned about. **Are other folks making changes to their code to adapt to MS Edge? **
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Moz Crawl Diagnostic shows lots of duplicate content issues
Hi my client's website uses URL with www and without www. In page/title both website shows up. The one with www has page authority of 51 and the one without 45. In Moz diagnostic I can see that the website shows over 200 duplicate content which are not found in , e.g. Webmaster. When I check each page and add/remove www then the website shows the same content for both www and no www. It is not redirect - in search tab it actually shows www and then if you use no www it doesn't show www. Is the www issue to blame? or could it be something else? and what do I do since both www URL and no-www URL have high authority, just set up redirect from lower authority URL to higher authority URL?
Technical SEO | | GardenPet0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below, Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
CSS Issue or not?
Hi Mozzers, I am doing an audit for one of my clients and would like to know if actually the website I am dealing with has any issues when disabling CSS. So I installed Web developer google chrome extension which is great for disabling cookies, css... When executing "Disable CSS", I can see most of the content of the page but what is weird is that in certain sections images appear in the middle of a sentence. Another image appears to be in the background in one of the internal link section(attached pic) Since I am not an expert in CSS I am wondering if this represents a CSS issue, therefore a potential SEO issue? If yes why it can be an SEO issue? Can you guys tell me what sort of CSS issues I should expect when disabling it? what should I look at? if content and nav bar are present or something else? Thank you dBCvk.png
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
What's the issue?
Hi, We have a client who dropped in the rankings (initially from bottom of the first page to page to page 3, and now page 5) for a single keyword (their most important one - targeted on their homepage) back in the middle of March. So far, we've found that the issue isn't the following: Keyword stuffing on the page External anchor text pointing to the page Internal anchor text pointing to the page In addition to the above, the drop didn't coincide with panda or penguin. Any other ideas as to what could cause such a drop for a single keyword (other related rankings haven't moved). We're starting to think that this may just have been another small change in the algorithm but it seems like too big of a drop in a short space of time for that to be the case. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jasarrow0