Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
-
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links.
We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results:
-42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed.This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them>
I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once?
Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that?
Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups?
Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.
-
As Michael Edwards pointed out you need to spend some time look at the links & sites yourself to ascertain their suitability.
-
Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.
We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.
In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.
Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.
I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?
Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
"Most 503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway. " Yes if they are low quality non-human edited then yes i'd disavow.
"We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?" If ranking is impacted by a toxic link profile then disavowing only 75% of them will not recover you 75%, probably nothing.
"Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?" How long is a piece of string. The timeframe depends on how long it takes Google to crawl the toxic links.
Will this improve your rankings? I don't know is the simple answer. The best bet is to take the links on merit and disavow the ones you know are clearly toxic, manipulated etc. But soon as you mention improvement it makes me wonder if you have had a hit on organic traffic. If that is the case and it was around Sept onwards you may be looking at a broader E-A-T issue so disavowing would not resolve the bigger issue. That's pure guesswork but you get my point.
I don't know anyone who has any significant success with requesting links to be removed, other than sharks trying to charge to do so. You could argue that the 'good' sites will help, the poor sites ignore/charge, but it's a bit too much time and effort to use that signal in any way.
Mick
-
Hi Michael:
Thanks for your feedback.
Most 503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway.
We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?
Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?
Also, do you think we should reach out to these webmasters and make a written request to remove the bad links? We tried this 3 years ago and it was a total waste of time.
Thanks,
Alan -
I think the most important aspect of your question is to not trust a tool. The tool might flag domains/URLs as spam or manipulated links but the most important thing is to manually inspect each domain. I have had reports from tools where the domain in question is actually not a problem at all when inspected.
If you are getting 404, 403 or 503 error messages the links are gone. You wouldn't be penalised by Google for these because they no longer exist. There is no need to disavow because they don't exist, but you wouldn't be causing a problem if you did. The potential issue is that those header responses 'could' change back to a 200 found. I'd be inclined to monitor them at this stage and add to the disavow if the status changes. A 503 header is a maintenance response so that may come back and you would want to check what you'd be disavowing, as the link may be good.
With regard to disavowing all the links. If you have a toxic link profile you have an issue you need to address and resolve as quickly as you can, so if you determine there are 100 toxic links/domains you will want to add them to the disavow in one hit and hope that you have captured them all.
But please be aware that if some of the links are just a bit spammy/low quality then Google looks like it takes the view to ignore those links anyway.
Some things you need to manually check are:
- the relevance of the link
- the quality of the content
- the anchor text (e.g. have you got exact match, close match anchor on multiple dubious quality posts)
- the ranking of the page/domain
- the placement of the link on the page (e.g. is is a site-wide footer link).
- the quality throughout the domain
- is the link paid for but dofollow (e.g. are there signs on the site that content can be somehow 'purchased', advertorial)
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
-
Breadcrumbs and internal links
Hello, I use to move up my site structure with links in content. I have now installed breadcrumbs, is it is useful to still keep the links in content or isn't there a need to duplicate those links ? and are the breadcrumbs links enough. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Too many iframes hurts ranking?
I have 6 different iframe blocks (with same content in those iframes) in every page of my website. I know iframe don't be crawled by search engines but, maybe you experts give me some advice? Is that negative for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Maximum number of links
Hi there, I have just written an article that is due to be posted on an external blog, the article has potentially 3 links that could link to 3 different pages on my website, is this too much? what do you recommend being the maximum number of links? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780