Questions about Bad Backlinks and Disavow Tool

4 replies
  • SEO
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Hello Warriors,

I'm a beginner at SEO, and I have a few questions about a situation my website is going thru. I don't expect anyone to know all the answers, but any insight from experienced internet marketers would be greatly appreciated.

My website has been running for about 6 years and is profitable. However sales have slower than they used to be, since the last 10 months or so. I don't know the reason why or if it has anything to do with SEO. Either way, I have started paying more attention to SEO so I can make my business stronger.

I have taken a look at my backlink profile from Google Webmaster Tools. I have backlinks from 262 domains. Out of that, 128 backlinks are obvious spam sites. They have extremely low quality garbage content which is generated by a bot, most of the writing doesn't even make sense. These links have nothing to do with me. I did not create these links, and neither did I hire anybody to do so. I think they are all coming from the same source because the content is very similar and all websites are using the same wordpress theme.

I want to get rid of them. But because 50% of my backlinks are from these spam links, disavowing them would mean losing half of my backlinks. I'm afraid this may negatively affect my SEO. Should I just keep these bad backlinks and just work on building good backlinks, or should I remove them?

Here are a couple examples of the domains that the links are coming from:

http://safemaleenhancement.com/
http://instantmaleenhancement.com/
http://malesizeenhancement.com/
http://penishealthy.news/

Does Google definitely know that this is spam and penalizing my website for it? Or is it possible that Google is accidentally considering it a good backlink and removing it will hurt my rankings? Please note that I haven't received any warning from Google or manual web spam actions.

The reason I am asking so many questions is because I have read many articles like this: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven't actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you're essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it's not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
#backlinks #bad #disavow #questions #tool
  • Profile picture of the author expmrb
    If you know that they are spammy links then why should you even consider keeping them? They are not doing any good but certainly they can hurt your site in the future. And doesn't matter how many links do you have its the quality of them that matters. So, get rid of them ASAP.
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  • Profile picture of the author FNIvan1243
    Ignore it, on shortern is not good, but it good for longterm.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tony Marriott
    "My website has been running for about 6 years and is profitable. However sales have slower than they used to be, since the last 10 months or so. I don't know the reason why or if it has anything to do with SEO. Either way, I have started paying more attention to SEO so I can make my business stronger. "

    Unfortunately if you do not know the reason for your dropping sales numbers then you have a major job ahead of you to fix the problem.

    I am assuming you do not have any paid traffic as that requires a different approach altogether.

    You must use some kind of analytics on your website (I.e. Google analytics) so that you can see where your traffic is coming from, where it's going to (on your site), how much of it you have, what traffic converts and what pages do the conversions and what keywords are ranking and where.

    With this kind of historical data you can easily see when things are changing both for the worse or the better.

    If you have fallen into any kind of real penalty then you should be informed inside your Google Webmasters console.

    If you are simply a casualty of Googles algo changes then you can compare your changing search ranking dates with a list of algo changes. You can find a list at https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change.

    You say your sales dropped around 10 months ago. If you check the above link you will see that a new Penguin Update was rolled out at the end of September 2016. If you have bad backlinks or backlink/anchor text profiles it is possible that this update affected your site.

    Only possible, as you do not have a specific date to check (as far as I understand).

    But it shows the basic principle if you have accurate data.

    It is also possible that you have simply lost rankings against competitors. Especially if the sales were a steady decline rather than a sudden drop off.


    To answer your question about the 'spam' backlinks.
    I has a quick look at the sites you mentioned and they are for sure spam sites with absolutely zero authority so even if you have backlinks from the sites they will be worth absolutely nothing.

    Get rid of them. Even if they are not penalizing you now they have the potential to do so in the future. It takes just one more Google algo change.

    Penguin (the algo that looks at bad links etc.) is now part of the main program so will be applied/fixed in real time. Although most bad links are now just not counted rather than leading to a penalty.

    Of course there are plenty of reasons for a page to rank and fro that rank to change. There are also a lot of other places in the sales funnel that could cause reductions in sales. That is why you need detailed analytics of traffic and conversions.
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  • Profile picture of the author jamie3000
    Personally unless you think it's a negative seo attack and you are not penalised I'd just leave them.
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