Do you have to wait after disavowing before submitting a reconsideration request
-
Hi all
We have a link penalty at the moment it seems. I went through 40k links in various phases and have disavowed over a thousand domains that date back to old SEO work. I was barely able to have any links removed as the majority are on directories etc that no one looks after any more etc and / or which are spammy and scraped anyway.
According to link research tools link detox tool, we now have a very low risk profile (I loaded the disavowed links into the tool for it to take into consideration when assessing our profile). I then submitted a reconsideration request on the same day as loading the new disavowed file (on the 26th of April). However today (7th May) we got a message in webmaster central that says our link profile is still unnatural. Aaargh.
My question: is the disavow file taken into consideration when the reconsideration request is reviewed (ie is that information immediately available to the reviewer)? Or do we have to wait for the disavow file to flow through in the crawl stats? If so, how long do we have to wait?
I've checked a link that I disavowed last time and it's still showing up in the links that I pull down from Webmaster Central, and indeed links that I disavowed at the start of April are still showing up in the list of links that can be downloaded.
Any help gratefully received. I'm pulling my hair out here, trying to undo the dodgy work of a few random people many months ago!
Cheers,
Will
-
You seem to have a good handle on the issue but you might consider getting an experienced SEO in for at least a second opinion. We can only give very general help here on the Q&A, as we don't have access to your data
They do say to wait at least a few weeks for results
Cheers
S
-
Hi Stephen
I've been using the links downloaded from Webmaster (as directed to by Matt Cutts in one of his videos IIRC) plus also the data set from Link Research Tools. Is that insufficient? I've only got so many hours in the day as my day job is running this company...I figured taking the links that Google gave me would surely be enough...but these days who knows. G seems to want to make people jump through a lot of hoops...
-
Hey Marcus
Thanks for your input. Yeah, we have a lot of links but then we've been around for 7 years and weirdo scrapers and random replicants of DMOZ alone contribute a zillion links without us even having done anything. Not saying we didn't do link building back in the day (we did, just like everyone else, in what was at the time a white hat fashion but apparently no longer is) but we have had no permanent marketing team at all for the last two years as we've focused on some B2B parts of our business. So frustrating that bad links just kept growing and we're supposed to be responsible for them!
Anyway, as you say, will need to go in a bit harder I guess. eg just because a site is PR0, I didn't remove it before, as some random person with a no marks blog who used our birthday balloon picture on their blog didn't deserve to be disavowed as far as I thought. But, well, I can't take any chances now so will just have to bin anything under PR1 and take another look at links from themed websites (eg should I disavow other blogs that have added us to their blogroll unsolicited even if they're in our vertical? It's hard to tell. What about genuine flower directories? Who knows?).
What's really frustrating is that the whole message from Matt Cutts is "you really shouldn't use this tool" (ref disavow) as you could damage your site but 1. barely anyone takes links down when requested as far as I can tell and 2. given the amount of junk that's been pointed at our site that we're not responsible for (though we are are responsible for some), then I think the contention that very few people would need to use it is a bit optimistic and there's therefore a danger or people like me totally shooting themselves in the foot, given there are no clear rules on the grey areas I mention above.
PS understood that it's not some magic solution and we'll rank #1 for everything afterwards. I just want to get it cleared up and be able to get back to my day job. God knows how a smaller business than us would cope with something like this. Seems to me it pushes the advantage even further in the direction of bigger companies with the resources to manage a screw up like this.
Anyway, blah blah. Time to get the machete out.
-
In my experience, if you have this message again, you still have links they don't like. 35% of linking domains is not a great deal and as Stephen said, whilst Link Detox gives you a good starting place you really do have to audit these links in a brutal fashion.
You have 15000 external links from 2000 sites - that's a hell of a lot of links for a semi popular blog let alone a site that does not really publish any content that would attract links.
If you are holding onto links as you think they are 'ok' or because they 'don't look too bad' then you may need to get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.
Also, just because you remove the manual penalty, don't expect things to be amazing afterwards.
An alternative approach to finding the bad links and getting them removed is to identify the good ones and consider getting them repointed to a new URL and starting again with a rebrand / new URL. It can be easier to get a response from the good sites than it can be getting a response from the bad ones.
Failing that get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
-
How sure are you you have a full dataset of links? What did you use as you database for links to start cleaning from? (I would expect ahrefs, GWT, seomoz + majestic etc)
S
-
Well, I also went through all the links manually which was the world's most boring task, then followed up with a healthcheck. Gah.
We've disavowed about 35% of all linking domains now...
-
I doubt its a time thing, it's more likely that they still see dirty links that you have not disallowed
That's the problem with these jump one the bandwagon tools like Link detox et al - they give you a nice score but that doesn't mean anything
404ing burnt pages and starting again may be a much quicker process than messing around with link disavowal
How many domains were linking and how many domains did you disallow?
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
-
Best tools for submitting contact forms of 1000 websites?
For a new B2B service we have identified websites that we would like to make aware of our service.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
There are about 1000 websites for which it was not possible to retrieve emails, and where we need to do the outreach using the websites contact pages. Do you know of any tools that save time or outsource companies specialized in such a service? We do not want to fully automize the process but a human should do a visual check that form is properly filled. What I imagine could save time would be tools that already load from a list of URLs the next pages already in the background of the browser and good autoform fillers. Any recommendations?0 -
Is possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using Google Search Console?
We have a client that will not grant us access to their Google Search Console (don't ask us why). Is there anyway possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using GSC? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Disavowing 100k Affiliate Links
Hi all, hope you're all good. I am updating our disavow file, we've noticed a couple more spammy links which are pointing at or site. While I was at it, affiliate links came to my mind. At the moment we have over 100k+ affiliate links pointing to the root of our site and other categories/products, most of them are do-follow. However, taking a look at WMT, it's one of our 'Who links the most' and the affiliate network is pointing a total of 115,065 links to us. My question; bearing it mind this site generates over 2million hits a month, is it really worth disavowing the entire affiliate link network. This would result is all of those 100,000 links being disavowed over time. Do you think this would result in a positive? Let me know your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Disavow straightaway? - Urgent
Is there any implication with disavowing straightaway from Google's perspective? I know good practice is to request removal from the web host, however I don't have the time to contact and process the requests. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
When to Disavow
I'm in the process of doing a link cleanup (nothing I have done just ended up with them). I stumbled across one or two doc hosting sites, the domain parameters aren't bad but I don't think they drive any value and they do look a bit dodgy. They mainly only comprise of a little bit of text and Google custom search. 1. Is there any point disavowing? 2. Could it do any harm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Art website is being spammed for NFL Jerseys - should I disavow?
I have no idea why or what their mistake/intent would be, but my mom's artist website (kathleenmrobison.com) has been link/anchor text spammed for NFL jerseys - so weird. As seen in SEMrush, her site is actually ranking for some of these keywords - but we don't want/need these at all. Do we proactively disavow all of these sites in with the disavow file, or just ignore until we get problems with warnings? **Edit: **I also see that some fake URLs have been created, so it is definitely a spam/hacked issue. 6495ws 6496zi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joe.Robison0 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450