Best to Leave Toxic Links or Remove/Disovow on Site with Low Number of Linking Domains
-
Our site has only 87 referring domains (with at least 7,100 incoming links). LinkDetox has identified 29% of our back links as being toxic and 14% as being questionable. Virtually all of these links derive from spammy sites.
We never received a manual penalty, but ever since the first Penguin penalty in 2012 our search volume and ranking has dropped with some uneven recover in the last 3 years.
By removing/disavowing toxic links are we risking that over optimized link text will be removed and that ranking will suffer as a result? Are we potentially shooting ourselves in the foot? Would we be better to spend a few months building quality links from reputable domains before removing disavowing bad links? Or toxic links (as defined by LinkDetox) so bad that it should be a priority to remove them immediately before taking any other step?
Thanks, Alan
-
If your site has in fact been negatively impacted by Penguin, you'll have to wait for the next Penguin refresh for your changes to have an impact. You may see fluctuations due to other algorithm changes though.
-
That is reassuring!!! My concern is that the number of domains that link to our site is so low (less than 100) that evening removing low quality links could be a negative.
In terms of seeing a ranking/traffic improvement, do you think we could expect it once the links are removed/disavowed or do you think it would occur only upon a Penguin update?
Thanks!!! Alan
-
Toxic, spammy links can only hurt you, but they are even more harmful if they make up a large percentage of your total backlinks. Remove/disavow them as soon as possible and work on earning legitimate, high-value backlinks. Also, over-optimized link text can be harmful as well.
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
-
Need help Taking my Site to the Next Level
Any, and I mean ANY suggestions would be Great and Welcome, Good and Bad. Have a Good site, with what I believe good content, and just stuck at the same level for over 6 months. Please and Thank you for taking a few minute of time out of your day on this. Joe https://www.surecretedesign.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | surecreteproucts0 -
Why would on-site search queries show up as referral traffic?
The site analytics have been set up for over a year and suddenly last month there was a huge spike in referral traffic (1100+ sessions). Upon further investigation, the majority of it was coming directly from internally, either as mysite.com or search.mysite.com and the landing pages from the referrals are all /search.html?query=* This was never an issue before so I'm trying to understand what could have changed. I'm following up with the client to find out if their dev team may have changed anything related to their search engine but I'm wondering if there may be another explanation. A few notes: previously mysite.com / search.mysite.com were not in the Referral Exclusion list. I've added them now but this was never an issue before. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | SEMnMs0 -
Misconfigured event tracker on a site
I'm on the case to diagnose an unnaturally low bounce rate, as in under 2%. Yes, the site has two Universal analytics tags, but Google says that would not compromise data (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032400?hl=en). So I am trying to figure out how to look at event tracking to see if there is a configuration error. But, I am not a developer so am unsure how to review and would welcome the help of the Moz community. The site is http://corsa.com if you wish to take a peek. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | butler_emily0 -
Site account in Google Analytics
Hello I have a question about my site account. On 2014, during a week, my ID tracking of Google Analytics was removed of the site, in this period the volume of users and sessions is lower than the other weeks. But I don't understand why are the sessions and users still reporting during this period without ID Tracking
Reporting & Analytics | | Arkix0 -
What type of links/redirect is Yahoo! using?
So I'm trying to figure out exactly what type redirect or hyperlinking Yahoo! is using on their article pages. For example:
Reporting & Analytics | | William.Lau
https://shopping.yahoo.com/blogs/fashionate/spring-clean-your-beauty-routine--10-tips-on-looking-fresh-this-season-000058218.html Hover over an external link, it shows you the ending URL. Right or left click it, it gives you a 302 redirect. When you actually left click it, it adds and "id" attribute, I assume for tracking. However, when you left click the the hyperlink, it no longer shows as a 302. I have limited working knowledge of web development techniques, so anyone with advance knowledge or have actually done this, it'd be helpful to understand this more.0 -
What is the difference between External Followed Links, Total External Links and Total Links?
What is the difference between Total External Links and Total Links? Below is my metric and 3 competitors. | External Followed Links | 12 | 43 | 227 | 5 |
Reporting & Analytics | | seohlp44
| Total External Links | 19 | 51 | 296 | 11 |
| Total Links | 2,990 | 704 | 15,234 | 12,518 |0 -
Cross Domain Tracking in GA (without cross domain links)
Hi everyone, Been doing some research about cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics (preferably Universal Analytics where documentation is a bit spare). All of the tutorials focus on the auto-linking and ensuring links to the other site are taken care of. I'm considering a site that may not cross-link like that at all (or it may, but won't be the main avenue). A good example is: www.gap.com
Reporting & Analytics | | ketanmv
www.bananarepublic.com
www.oldnavy.com Now, they do link to the other brands in their navigation but let's pretend that they don't necessarily do that. Gap Corporate may want to roll up all these domains into a single reporting profile because customers can clearly visit any of those sites on their own and buy. It would be nice to know that Visitor X bought 2 items from gap.com and 3 from oldnavy.com... and of course, here were their campaigns, etc. From what I am reading, I am not sure this is really possible. It seems that the cross-domain code is really only best for when my main site links to another domain for checkout or something. But in my example, we are definitely not in control of that kind of behavior. Thoughts? Perhaps I need to recommend they go with subdomains only which Universal GA seems to handle quite fine out of the box. Thank you!0 -
Spam link? Links from linguee.*
Hello, in a site, in which I'm working .. in webmaster tools i see a lot of links as following: With more links to your site: linguee.es 3.066
Reporting & Analytics | | jarizaro
linguee.com 2.964
linguee.pe 2.722
linguee.mx 2.721 Total inlinks to my site are 20.000, and links incoming from linguee.* are more than 50% !!! My site is about spanish courses in spain, but i think all these links are fuck*ng me. I checked if these links have nofollow tag, and not, they don't have this attritute. What can i do? My site is going down in Google. ¿disavow that domain? Please help.0