Old Spammy Backlinks but No Manual Penalty...No Results
-
We have taken over a site in which the client had unfortunately hired an SEO consultant who bought bad comment spam links. Webmaster Tools does not show a manual penalty of any kind but clearly this was bad practice from the former "SEO" consultant. I believe we have a good structure of the completely new website we have built for the client but I am not sure of the best way to reduce any negative fallout from the previous actions.
I've read conflicting information about submitting disavow report to Google for the comment spam links. In some cases, I have read that it would be irrelevant since there is not a manual penalty. I am fairly certain rankings are being negatively effected from this action and looking for the best way to neutralize the algorithmic penalty.
Not sure if this helps or not but I use GWMT "Download Latest Links" and see that the soonest Google discovered one of these links is 4/4/2013. Most of the links were generated some time during 2012.
How do you even begin to try to reach out and have comment spam manually removed...when most of the sites that allowed the comment spam to begin with are spam sites themselves?
-
Without looking at the links specifically it is hard to speculate. Realistically the site made it through all Penguin updates unharmed. That has to say something. Disavowing the links will have a negative affect on SEO. It will take time to come back from it. It is expensive and time consuming. I would pose the options to your client and see what they decide. Pros and Cons of both options and let them decide.
-
Monica and Sheena,
Thank you for the responses.
We are working on producing new, good, quality content.
Monica, the problem is that these sites are pretty much abandoned spam sites, many of them not even in English. Finding the actual webmaster and communicating with them is a very difficullt, if not impossible task. In most cases, these spam links are in the form of comment spam.
-
Have you reached out to the Webmasters first? I know it seems silly, but it would be better than a disavow action. Refreshing the link profile would be really helpful too, like Sheena said, having high quality links from content.
I would not recommend a disavow action be the first step. I would try to remove the links first, because you can't be 100% certain that is what is causing the ranking problems for the site.
-
All good points you're making here. Unfortunately, there isn't a consensus on whether it's best to use the tool or not. I fall into the category of SEOs who disavow obvious spam/low quality links even without any manual penalty notification... I feel it's the honest thing to do & also don't like the idea of waiting for Google to really penalize the site. I then focus on creating unique, engaging, possibly long-format content pieces that the audience will love & share (building up authentic, high quality, contextually-relevant links that support on-site optimization & outnumber/overshadow any residual low quality links).
This Moz post walks through some critical steps for using the tool: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
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
-
Backlinks niche specific or high DA?
Hello Moz Community,I have sports niche website. I am in process of link building for my website. One query in my mind. Which backlink is better for increasing my MOZ DA and domain authority in terms of google domain authority.1: Profile backlink of DA50+ website , not belonging to my sports niche.2:DA 10 or DA 20+ link belonging to my sports niche.Which out of these will help gain better MOZ DA.ThanksRakesh
Link Building | | T4FS0 -
.edu backlinks.. where to point them for a scholarship
Hello, My company offers an annual college scholarship to Women in Business. I have numerous colleges that have agreed to post our scholarship on their college websites. I want to make sure I get the full value of the .edu backlink and need some advice. I have a brand new scholarship page with no authority and that's basically orphaned from the rest of the website. This page details the application process for the scholarship. If I were to link out to my home page, and say 3-4 other top landing pages, would this be the best way to flow some of that link juice into my site? Or is there a better way to do this? Another thought I had was this.... I could take one of my top landing pages, www.example.com/example, and place the scholarship information on that page at the bottom, and have the school link to this: www.example.com/example#scholarship (so the scholarship info appears on top when applicants click it)-- My question here is this... becase the second URL includes an anchor, does google treat that as a different page? Or would the pagerank flow to www.example.com/example ? Recovering from unnatural link warnings and algorthmic penalties and trying to get the best benefit out of the new, quality links I'm building. Any advise would be appreciated! THANKS!
Link Building | | ktrout0 -
Which page should my backlink lead to?
I used Keyword A for Page A, and Keyword B for Page B. Now Page B ranks on the first page in Keyword A. When I create backlinkS with Keyword A, should I link to Page A or Page B?
Link Building | | joony20080 -
Backlinks From Press Releases - Should I Disavow Them?
About 2 months ago, I published a press release through PRWEB with a link back to my website of course. Now it must have been one of those morning where the coffee wasn't strong enough as my website already has a Penguin penalty I'm trying to get lifted. The intent wasn't to spam the web but rather to gain some traction in the business hosting world. Like I've said, the coffee must've been too weak that morning as it didn't even cross my mind to see if I could "nofollow" the links in the press release. I just hit the submit button... As I'm in the process of submitting a disavow links request to Google, I'm wondering if I should include the URLs to copies of those press releases? I mean, there's no way I can find all those links as it was submitted not long ago. Google and link tools will keep discovering other copies of the PR for months to come probably.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Old Links Remove or not to remove?
Hey everyone, So i have a site which I had previous seo work on over the years, none of which was successful for me. Now that I have taken over the seo work, I am analyzing my old links I have a certain amount of links from what I would see are "crappy" seo sites and I wondered if I need to try and remove them. Here are a few examples. http://seorankingsresult.com/what-to-consider-when-shopping-for-electricians-tools/ http://seoservicepackages.com/tag/electricians-tools/ How do I check if google has penalized me for these links and should I start removing them? ThanksMichelle
Link Building | | nutjobshell0 -
Squidoo and hub pages links spammy?
I was wondering if links from sites like studio, hub pages and tumblr are worth it in 2013 post panda/penguin? It seems spammy to me but some people appear to still use them? any thoughts?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Why aren't my backlinks showing up?
I've recently switched hosting my site on www.vamospaella.com to www.vamospaella.co.uk (using a 301 redirect) and I've been building backlinks. According to Majesticseo, vamospaella.co.uk has 38 backlinks with 8 referrring domains and vamospaella.com has 15 external backlinks from 11 referring domains. Some of these backlinks date back a month, while others have shown up in the last week. However, I have seen no improvement in my Google rankings for my keywords. Why is this?
Link Building | | RMelly0