Active disavowing

[nibnab]

Just curious, how often (or if ever) do you disavow links?
Do you disavow monthly, quarterly or yearly? What are the results?
What are your thoughts about disavowing links in general?

 

[Thomas Andreas]

Honestly, almost never. I think maybe one time. I dont know how other does it. But as I understood it, is that google dont really penalizes you anymore if you have spammy links, rather they will just not count the link

 

[Thomas Andreas]

Hmm, does anyone else have any input on this? Should you still spend time disavowing links?

 

[RyanWeb]

Also almost never... Maybe once a year a good idea to go through and disavow ones that are obviously unrelated or harmful, otherwise I think any legit site is going to have a few non-awesome links pointing to it. Overall link profile matters more, if you have 30 links and 3 are very low quality, is going to be different then if 20 of them are very low quality.

If you find a porn site with 100 obls linking to you, disavow it. Otherwise, time would likely be better spend building up higher quality links then removing med-lower quality ones. My opinion.

 

[nwalker]

Never. I do keep an eye on what's reported in Search Console though, just in case i need to start.

 

[MJM]

Good thread. I'll add my take and process...

The stronger your site is, the less you need to do this. The more you engage in any questionable practices, the more you need to stay on top of this - just my opinion. We are extremely white hat in general, almost to the point of paranoia in how we operate - but we don't invest a lot of time into active disavowing. I'd say in general we do this quarterly, which I think makes sense for most of us.

 

[RyanWeb]

Good thread. I'll add my take and process...

The stronger your site is, the less you need to do this.

Would agree with this. Larger sites are going to have a few questionable links naturally. Just how the internet works. The main thing is to watch for anti linking campaigns. If someone is going around linking you to questionable sites, that is something you would want to be aware of.

 

[danniee]

Never. The site still ranks very well.

 

[Roulette Zeitung]

If the disavowing thing would make no sense, it would not be there.

I did that once a year or every nine months to disavow this desperate attacks from some bad SEO morons, and the old, simple and free CSV Viewer ( http://www.csvviewer.com ) is very helpful to me.

After that it was always the same pattern. First I dropped in the serps and then the positions returned but became a little more stable.

I believe, Google has an individual fingerprint for every website for several reasons. That's why impacts or effects are very often different.

 

[nibnab]

If the disavowing thing would make no sense, it would not be there.

I did that once a year or every nine months to disavow this desperate attacks from some bad SEO morons, and the old, simple and free CSV Viewer ( http://www.csvviewer.com ) is very helpful to me.

After that it was always the same pattern. First I dropped in the serps and then the positions returned but became a little more stable.

I believe, Google has an individual fingerprint for every website for several reasons. That's why impacts or effects are very often different.

The whole disavow tool seems is a bit of legacy tool, no? It's hidden and cannot be directly accessed from the SC menu?

 

[Xilenciso]

I always refresh disavow files for amount of reasons and I recommend you to follow it with special care. Believe me - I know what I'm saying. I had negative experience of ignoring Disavow file. Many of incompetent "SEO-bloggers" state that it doesn't work, but it does. Of cource, if you have very-very-very poor links history or spammed backlinks profile and add the Disavow file with thousand domains in it at once after your site loose traffic and positions - it will not work. But when you carefully handle you links profile - it will help you greatly. Here are the reasons why I do this.

Advertising/linkbuilding companies. I usually disavow links after detecting them in Ahrefs on in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) an abnormal or unnatural spike of links especially links from all pages of donor. As sometimes my marketers launch advertising companies, buy banners or Advertorials or native advertising. These links are placed in all pages of donor website, if you place in banner in sidebar or link in the footer so they appear frequently and sometimes the number of donor pages can be like 20k pages or more. Of course, marketers do not always add "rel=nofollow" tags for such links (Also, recently Google Google provided new rel="sponsored" for sponsored links), so these pages pass Page Rank. Google DO NOT like such links at all and in their "Link Schemes" official guide (here is Google link to Google guideline if you're interested) prohibit "Text advertisements that pass Pagerank".

By the way, if you use guest posting you never know how the CMS of donor website, the page with the article can duplicate in filters/tags pages/ or in auto-generated lang versions and it duplicates (up to thousands links can appear) due to the technical particular qualities.

That was the first reason of Disavowing links. If your marketing or linkbuilding campaigns are very active you should follow the links daily and refresh this file.

Filters or manual actions. Once I had a 6 yers old website devoted to "free slots" (common affiliate website) 100k+ monthly visits from Google. It has thousand links and not always white-hat techniques like drop-domain, excess of dofollow anchor links and different link building teams with lack of expertise and analysis and strategies. But also, it has a very strong white-hat links. When it got to Google 1st position on a money-keyword with frequency 20k monthly it was spammed by competitors with low-quality spammed links. After that the website lost 80% of traffic because of Google Manual actions for backlinks. I spent about 2 month to clean backlink profile: I wrote the letters to webmasters to remove anchor links, for links directories to remove links and many-many-many links were removed. About 30%. SO. The next step were to remove spammy links and anyone answered to my letters, so I added the screenshots of sent messages to the file (the file I sent to Google, called "Reconsideration Request"), also, I added all spammy links to Disavow file. Only after all these action were made - Google Removed manual actions. And their first recommendation was to ADD DISAVOW FILE FOR LINKS WHICH CAN NOT BE REMOVED.


Disavow file for new websites. After these two stories (and many more I can't describe at once due to my not perfect English, sorry : D) I have a new website in an Australian market devoted to free online pokies (here is an example). It's about a half year-old but it's already parsed by content scratchers and competitor links, I regularly update disavow and it growth.


If I didn't explain clearly, please write here you questions and if you're interested in this topic I'll give you my feedback on your links.

 

[TerryfyingGilmor]

I always refresh disavow files for amount of reasons and I recommend you to follow it with special care. Believe me - I know what I'm saying. I had negative experience of ignoring Disavow file. Many of incompetent "SEO-bloggers" state that it doesn't work, but it does. Of cource, if you have very-very-very poor links history or spammed backlinks profile and add the Disavow file with thousand domains in it at once after your site loose traffic and positions - it will not work.

Thank you for all details! I see all business owners here do not refresh disavow file, but it need to be refreshed. I just wondered, so if I ad guest posts done I should disavow them? Didn't understand this part of your message Which links should be disavowed among all guests?

 

[Xilenciso]

Thank you for all details! I see all business owners here do not refresh disavow file, but it need to be refreshed. I just wondered, so if I ad guest posts done I should disavow them? Didn't understand this part of your message Which links should be disavowed among all guests?

I'm not saying to remove to disavow your guestposts) I just considered that you should keep your backlink profile clean. For example, if you have 100% links and 50% of these links are from very trustful donor So you should analyse how many such DOFOLLOW links your competitors have and stick to this value.For example it is 20%. So then you should revise backlink profile and shorten the number of your dofollow. First you find the low trust links by majestic SEO Bulk Backlink checker. Then pick the links with Trust lower than 20 and high Spam Score (Citation flow) and write lettters to webmasters to remove them due to the bad quality. Write the letters for the second time to make sure they accepted it. Some poor links will be removed, some will be not. for the second you should add disavow file.

That's all. This is just very compressed explanation of what I mean. You should do this depending on how many links you build and what quality of links you build to your website.

 

[TerryfyingGilmor]

Ok, thank you! So if consider such approach as you have I didn't refresh disavow file.
but I regularly add to it links like from porn or content scrappers or search engine or services. From the last month I noticed the coupon codes low quality websites that just steal my content with dofollow anchor links to my domain..

 

[Xilenciso]

You're right! that's the best way to deal wit such problems. Also, you can use DMCA to protect (please, PM me and I'll explain you how does it work as this thread i devoted to another topic. I have some cases in y practic on how to fight this Sh**t with scrapping content.

Guys, if you have any questions considering backlinks - I'm welcome to help you as now I'm on quarantine and have some free time for this stuff.

 

[MartinCalvert]

Some good advice here and generally I think the rule of thumb applies that if Google has a tool for something, there is a reason for it. A lot of it is about the ratio of links and even the topical spread - a blend of high authority but less topically relevant, and highly relevant but perhaps less high authority is just fine in many niches.

What people shouldn't do is keep building links that are neither relevant nor powerful - they may not get a penalty but they'll be disregarded.

 

[gm2891]

Hey guys,

I just checked my link profile in GSC and noticed that the more popular you become, the more bad friends you start to have...

Personally, I don't believe that Google takes care of sorting out which backlinks are good and bad for you. Last year, somebody did an "excellent job" for me and built a few links that put me out of SERPs for over six months.

When I disavowed that whole bunch of links, everything slowly got back to normal. For a high authority site, such a situation would be totally different than for a small one. Take casino.org, for instance.

They have thousands of Chinese backlinks that don't harm them at all, while the smaller site would get killed almost instantly. In my opinion, it better is to have 10 links that make sense and are relative to you than hundreds of shitty ones. From my practice, it works much better.

Still, my question is, what would you do with the following link and similar others, leave them to stay or disavow:

• ht-tps://radki.info/ (this site is in my Google search console top linking sites list. When clicking on it opens the one below.)

• ht-tps://radki.info/images/n1-casino-freespins.php (This is a page that is actually linking to one of mine. When clicking, it takes me to the following the one below.)

• ht-tp://a.snexfxgl.xyz/apiv3/p2s/eli?p=n1%20casino%20freespins}&subid=TB_n1%20casino%20freespins&pb=w5m6ksake7u7f7h72u7l9d4h (This one redirects me to the next below...)

• ht-tps://cartageous.com/search/?kw=n1%20casino%20freespins}&subid=746TB_n1%20casino%20freespins&pback=https :// d2q2b2smtdn85x.cloudfront.net/stats/v2/p2sclk/serp?pns=C2nOzMvLzd1IB gvUzc1UmNmMAxntCg9UC2vYzwq9Dhj1zszWyxj0Awq9zwXPjMm9r0iMC3vIAwq9vejFBJeLmJbJyxnPBM8LmJbMCMvLC3bPBNmMA2v5D29Yzhm9BJeLmJbJyxnPBM8LmJbMCMvLC3bPBNmLn0qMCg9ZDgjHy2TPzd13nw02A3nHA2u3DtDMn2G3mNu3BdLKngGMC2vHCMnOvhLWzt1UmNm=&psid=12353&auth = SDj1 (Here, as you can see in the image below, is complete nonsense...)

As I understand, Google sees radki.info, but does not see what's happening behind it. Another funny thing is that this radki.info is for sale on Godaddy.

 

[Roulette Zeitung]

Disavow them.

 

[gm2891]

AGD mods, kill the link in my previous post (if needed). Sorry for missing it out!

 

[ddm]

negative affects for this type of stuff are more amplified if your site is not strong/established, or if the links are a big % of total backlinks, in my experience.

I generally try to always avoid this tool. good to see you had some + experiences with it gm.