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Disavow List Help

by RedWaterDub
41 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi... I have an algo penguin penalty..

I need some help to analyze and identify my links to update my disavowed link request list. I have a list of 38,000 links in my GWT that need to be checked. I am finding it very hard to work out which ones are causing harm to add to the list.

Can anybody help me with this?

Thanks
#disavow #list
  • Profile picture of the author Joshua Lowenthal
    Here's a pretty good piece of recent content involving links and Penguin 2.0.

    Deep Dive into a Penguin 2.0 Victim - Penalty Analysis and lot's of spammy links - LRT Link Research Tools LRT Link Research Tools
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  • Profile picture of the author attorneydavid
    I disavowed a bunch of stuff for multiple sites and didn't seem to recover any of them in the latest refresh.
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    • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
      Originally Posted by attorneydavid View Post

      I disavowed a bunch of stuff for multiple sites and didn't seem to recover any of them in the latest refresh.
      How long before this update did you make the disavow request?
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      • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
        Originally Posted by RedWaterDub View Post

        How long before this update did you make the disavow request?
        Dont wanna upset you, but maybe an Unnataural links message is yet to come. Because thats what happened to me last year. Fist Penguin, then Unnatural.

        SO Im not sure if you should wait.
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      • Profile picture of the author attorneydavid
        Originally Posted by RedWaterDub View Post

        How long before this update did you make the disavow request?
        Like last november. Lots of reports didn't do jack. Possibly penguin shifted from a mainly penalty to devaluation in which case I'd expect to see recoveries in a couple of months.
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        I've lost 90 pounds(160+ overall) fasting since January 2016 after failing for years on diets that just made me sick and miserable. Check out Prudently.com where I'm writing about fasting and weight loss. Get a Brandable Domain Name at Name Perfection.

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        • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
          Originally Posted by attorneydavid View Post

          Like last november. Lots of reports didn't do jack. Possibly penguin shifted from a mainly penalty to devaluation in which case I'd expect to see recoveries in a couple of months.
          Did you disavow how many links (domains) #attorneydavid ?
          Just to compare with me - I may have disawoed 50.
          My homepage still has more than 700 inbound links according to GMT.

          Maybe I havent disawoed enough.
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          • Profile picture of the author attorneydavid
            Originally Posted by Trabalhodigital View Post

            Did you disavow how many links (domains) #attorneydavid ?
            Just to compare with me - I may have disawoed 50.
            My homepage still has more than 700 inbound links according to GMT.

            Maybe I havent disawoed enough.

            In some cases like all but 10 showing on the webmaster tools I think largest domain was around 1k links. Definitely very conservative.
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            • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
              Originally Posted by attorneydavid View Post

              In some cases like all but 10 showing on the webmaster tools I think largest domain was around 1k links. Definitely very conservative.
              You seen to have disawoed way more than me.
              Anyway GMT says my site has more than 100 links coming from Yahoo,
              more 90 from other sites, etc, where my name (Luis) and my raw URL is beeing used as anchor.

              Maybe it doesnt have to be a keyword anchortext to be considered SPAM. Perhaps only by having too many links is a reason to be considered UNNATURAL.

              Well, I ll wait a little bit more, if no raise in SERPs shows up, a lot more will be disawoed.
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              • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
                I am now going thru all my 40000 links one by one pretty much. Looks like I be disavowing probably 80% which I think are suspicious enough to be offending.
                sad I kno, but interesting nevertheless.
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                • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
                  Bear in mind guys. Google has been clear that just because you file for the links to be disavowed does not mean they will disavow them. Its their decision based on your overall link profile and whether they feel you have made any good attempt at manually cleaning them up yourself.
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                  • Profile picture of the author sjames0077
                    I was hit with the bot penalty because my rankings went from 1st and 3rd pages to out of the top 100. Does google assign a -100 rankings drop?

                    I do have a lot of bad links I am disavowing, and I am attempting to build quality links - but I am a small one person business, I am guest blogging but what else could I be doing?

                    After I disavow how long should I wait for reconsideration request and is it true that nothing will change until a new penguin update scans the site?

                    Thanks!
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    • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
      Originally Posted by attorneydavid View Post

      I disavowed a bunch of stuff for multiple sites and didn't seem to recover any of them in the latest refresh.
      Same here. Though only one site.
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    • Profile picture of the author Joe118
      Originally Posted by attorneydavid View Post

      I disavowed a bunch of stuff for multiple sites and didn't seem to recover any of them in the latest refresh.
      That's to be expected. Google does not need your help to figure out which links are spammy -- they already are very aware. You're just confirming that you engaged in spammy link building yourself with the disavow tool.

      My advice was, is, and for the forseeable future is -- don't bother with the disavow tool. If you "got hit with a penalty" most likely what really happened is that Google discounted a bunch of your links so your ranking sank. Disavowing something that's already not taken into account by the algo will not get your rank back.

      Just don't bother, with one exception -- if your ranking has not suffered yet, and you get an "unnatural linking" warning, you just *might* want to disavow some of the really really spammy stuff.

      And OF COURSE Matt Cutts would say "take a machette to your links". LOL.
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      • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
        Perhaps webmasters/site owners with the following Situation:

        1 - Got hit by Penguin last year
        2 - Received UNNATURAL message and diluted links until got a REVOKAL message,
        3- DILUTED more links by asking to webmasters to delete AND by using the DISAVOW ( WMT shows clearly dilution on keyword anchor text )
        4 - New Penguin on this MAY came and so far NO raise in Rankings

        Should start thinking about giving up.
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      • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
        Originally Posted by Joe118 View Post

        -- don't bother with the disavow tool.
        I don't agree with that. It aint that simple. I think there is no harm in using it as the harm is already done. The only way to recover from a penguin hit is to get your link profile looking more healthy and disavowing is only a tool to help with the links you can not get removed yourself. I dont think penguin is simply devaluing the spammy links, i think the algo automatically adds penalties in severity according to many factors esp backlink profile ratio. ie; number of devalued links compared to overall... and some links they wont devalue at all, but will still add a penalty.

        By fixing my link profile, I am not trying to gain my rankings back, but trying to re-gain the ability to get my rankings back.

        Penguin is not simply finding spammy links and devaluing them, it adds penalties. I am pretty sure they are different things..

        that's my opinion so far anyway. and don't forget there are people who have already recovered from penguin penalties who claimed to have used disavow.

        Be good to hear from one or two of them?
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        • Profile picture of the author Joe118
          I agree it would be good to hear from people whose sites have recovered SOON AFTER doing a disavow, and without additional link building. So far I've seen plenty of:

          * People whose sites recovered without disavowing
          * People whose sites did NOT recover after disavowing

          This aligns with my own clients' experiences.

          I've never heard anyone who disavowed and got their ranking back.

          As you say, disavow may be a tool to clean up the set of links that you own up to, but all evidence at hand so far argues that it does not matter -- google already knows what is spammy and what is not. And there's no reason for google to believe you that the disavowed links are not ones you created yourself.

          We disagree on the penalty versus discounting issue. As a past search engine engineer, I can tell you that penalties are only assigned when the search engine has a very high degree of confidence that the site deserves the penalty, because it willfully violated webmaster guidelines.

          Please also note that there's only two ways to have a high degree of confidence that the site willfully violated those guidelines:

          * The on-site content violates the guidelines
          * The owner uses disavow to identify back links that they want google to discount

          First, 99% of the time, the disavowed links are already discounted (or devalued).

          Second, with the incidence of negative SEO being very low still, disavowing gives google a high degree of confidence that those links are there because the site owner made them. Bingo, a violation of the off-site guidelines. So the site may get a penalty now, in addition to the devaluing of those links (that's already happened, remember).

          In summary, every time that Matt Cutts opens his mouth and says X is bad or Y should not be done, and advises you to tell him about whether you did X or Y, ignore him and do X and Y in moderation. He's telling you that they need help to identify X and Y, because their algo is not good enough to do so itself.
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          • Profile picture of the author attorneydavid
            Originally Posted by Joe118 View Post

            I agree it would be good to hear from people whose sites have recovered SOON AFTER doing a disavow, and without additional link building. So far I've seen plenty of:f.
            Penguin is suppose to be periodically run (to a high degree confidence) like panda once was. Therefore if the problem is penguin and penguin is still periodically run then if you recover after a disavow but before a penguin run then either Penguin was NOT THE PROBLEM or Penguin has switched from being periodically run.
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            I've lost 90 pounds(160+ overall) fasting since January 2016 after failing for years on diets that just made me sick and miserable. Check out Prudently.com where I'm writing about fasting and weight loss. Get a Brandable Domain Name at Name Perfection.

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            • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
              Yes, well we have just had a penguin update so there should be some genuine recoveries been seen now. Anybody?
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  • Profile picture of the author PerformanceMan
    Cutts says you should take a 'machete' to your backlinks with Disavow.
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    • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
      Originally Posted by PerformanceMan View Post

      Cutts says you should take a 'machete' to your backlinks with Disavow.
      Yep. That's what I'm going to do.
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  • Profile picture of the author RazorSharpSamurai
    Banned
    I'm in the process of doing this for a client. He went with another SEO company that caused a red flag.

    Google want every link that's ever created using tools, prinate networks, and even manually created Web 2.0 or article directories. Remove the anchor texts from the ones you created if that's possible. They want only the legit sites. I end up having to disavow 90% out of around 3,000 links.

    Sucks for him, but its the only way to get his website back up. Eventually once they lift the penalty, its back to building only high quality.
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  • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
    I am still going ahead with it... what have I got to lose?... an already lost site?

    I found these helpful...

    The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty (and some info on Panda too) | SEOmoz

    How Google's Disavow Links Tool Can Remove Penalties

    Meeting Recording: Interflora - Deep Dive into Bad Links | AnyMeeting - The Completely Free Web Conferencing and Meeting Service

    Interflora Is Back: What Did They Fix & How Did They Come Back So Fast?

    How We Got Our Penalty Revoked Using the Disavow Tool (Case Study) - State of Search

    Penalty Recovery Story - SUCCESS
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  • Profile picture of the author attorneydavid
    To be honest at this point what I think the highest probability is that penguin 1 penalties were not refreshed and are still running.- on edit- not what happened I'm starting to see recoveries for disavowed pages deep in the serps.
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    I've lost 90 pounds(160+ overall) fasting since January 2016 after failing for years on diets that just made me sick and miserable. Check out Prudently.com where I'm writing about fasting and weight loss. Get a Brandable Domain Name at Name Perfection.

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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    I just received my manual action revoked message in GWT a couple of days ago.

    The penalty was placed April 2012.

    I removed a ton of links submitted a disavow file THAT WAS IMPROPERLY ENCODED, submitted a reconsideration request, and was denied.

    I removed more links, submitted a disavow file THAT WAS IMPROPERLY ENCODED, submitted a reconsideration request and was denied.

    I removed a few more links (not many left I needed to remove), submitted a disavow file that was properly encoded, submitted a reconsideration request and received the penalty lifted message 5 days later.

    I have to believe the disavow file helped but I had missed that it had to be encoded as UTF-8. I wonder if others have missed that, too?
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  • Profile picture of the author sjames0077
    Other than interflora I'm hard pressed to find many non-manual penalty recoveries. Feeling lost. I have one usa SEO company telling me they can rank in 6 months and another telling me to start a new domain as this one will probably not recover.

    Thoughts?
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    • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
      Originally Posted by sjames0077 View Post

      Other than interflora I'm hard pressed to find many non-manual penalty recoveries. Feeling lost. I have one usa SEO company telling me they can rank in 6 months and another telling me to start a new domain as this one will probably not recover.

      Thoughts?
      I'm not an SEO expert so I'd love to hear some other thoughts on this but I did toy with starting fresh on a new domain. There were two reasons I chose not to go that route.

      1) I had some great, natural backlinks to the existing domain that would not be easy to replace and that I really didn't want to give up.

      2) I had used article marketing extensively so that pieces of my posts now existed on a number of other domains (article directories and sites that had picked them up through syndication). I was concerned that moving my content to a new domain would cause my site to lose out on being seen as the original source of this content.

      Some sites may have a branding concern, too, if the site is well known for it's name and domain but I did not have that issue.

      I also had a couple of other traffic sources outside of Google so it wasn't as if I lost all traffic when the site was penalized.

      If I had not had those first two concerns, I believe I would have been much better off moving to a new domain based on the amount of time and effort it took to get the penalty revoked.

      That might be a way for you to look at things for your own site. What will you lose by moving to a new domain vs. the time it could take you to get the penalty removed?
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  • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
    In my opinion the penalty will be lifted.
    Perhaps after having done all things possible (disavow, dilute inlinks, change On site, etc) - Google just wants us to wait more.
    Because if I'm not wrong, "he" said - No Penalty would last forever as long as you show work

    Just wait and stop building unnatural links. Thats what I think.
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    • Profile picture of the author sjames0077
      What about building natural links such as original content with a brand link
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      • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
        Originally Posted by sjames0077 View Post

        What about building natural links such as original content with a brand link
        Im not quite sure what you trying to ask ( Im brazilian , sometimes things fails here)
        But building them where ? And you mean writing new original posts ?

        I think as long as you do not exagerate its OK.
        BUT after being penalized, the caution must be way bigger.
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        • Profile picture of the author sjames0077
          yes, such as quality links, not many, but here and there to try to build rank again.. i guess its my only shot

          thanks for the reply
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      • Profile picture of the author Joe118
        Originally Posted by sjames0077 View Post

        What about building natural links such as original content with a brand link
        "building" and "natural links" in one sentence?

        Enough said.
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  • Profile picture of the author affilorama-portal
    Great discussion here. If there are sites that have been removed from the penalty then perhaps, penalized sites can be worth saving. And I must agree that it'll be probably best to also focus in building links outside Google. This way, even when penalized, you still get good traffic to your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
    Yeah.. my penalty is from penguin, it is not a manual penalty. I feel an algo penalty is harder to recover from than a manual penalty. Hopefully this disavow thing will work (20000 crappy links). And I submitted a recon request anyway for the hell of it. Not much hope left but still a little... sure dont want to lose my domain,... alas, starting again might be where I'm at.

    My opinion for these days: If you're not a totally clever computer science genius with insider contacts but you still think you can beat Google with seo schemes, then you're stupid.
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  • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
    Congratulations buddy. You did a good job.
    Well, I have done some of that. What I still have to do is to disavow more links maybe.
    Before Penguin my site had 1200 maybe, now its 900

    I sent the disavow file 3 days ago. Now with the UTF-8 encoded. Lets see what happens.
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    • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
      HEY! Get this... Today I see my site is back.. penalty lifted.. woohoo!.. it worked.

      Not ranking well (expected).. but the keywords are all in the results again..

      Pretty drastic measures as I edited, deleted or disavowed about 25,000 links of my total 30,000 or so.... so I need to get more backlinks again to rank properly in serps and that is going to be hard as I no longer trust ANY seo services.... they either are CROOKs out to rip you off or they THINK they know what they're doing but ACTUALLY they don't.. (I can tell you without a doubt, it was seo services I used from warrior forum and other places that got me penalty in the first place)....
      ..... so NOW.. I need to think carefully about my next steps.....

      If anybody wants to know how to get a PENALTY lifted.. this is what I did..

      1/ work out what kind of penalty you actually have by checking analytics and corresponding serp drops with penguin/panda updates.. or/and google messages..
      2/ get a list of ALL of your backlinks.. use as many sources as you can and add them all together.. (GWT list most important)
      3/ ANALYZE.. many ways to do this... but the way I did it was to go thru every link one by one..... and open up the page where the link came from and LOOK at it really carefully.
      4/ Change the anchor texts, delete the link, or add to disavow list.

      NOTE: also.. some links that are not spammy might be hurting you too.. if you have used too many same kw anchor texts.. or there are simply too many of them compared to other types .. eg: I had way too many bookmarking links.. simply not natural for that period of time for a site so young. And I also had too many same keyword anchor links on many otherwise awesome articles in great relevant high authority guest blogs.. ( i kept a few tho, but killed many) ....it hurt but it was necessary.

      INDICATORS/Things to look for:
      1/ too many same keyword anchor texts.
      2/ too many links from one place
      3/ too many links in too short a time period
      4/ low quality sites that google distrusts .. is it even indexed?, check pr, check alexa, check DA, PA, google links to that page?
      5/ sites that use dofollow ad links (you be surprised how many otherwise fine looking sites do this)
      6/ part of a network or syndicate?.. often you will notice footprints in the urls... (look real hard to find these)
      7/ duplicate articles/bookmarks/profiles?
      8/ too many links on one page..
      9/ anything else you can notice on that page or site that breaks the google guidelines. (hidden text? - kw stuffing?)
      10/ and any page that just screams SPAMMY! .. (does the page even make sense?)

      If it's a page that is made for the link and has no other value then its a spam page.. eg: many profile pages are crap if you ask me.

      If it's pretending to be a legit page but is not then that is REALLY bad.

      Hope that helps...
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  • Profile picture of the author SINROX
    The disavow tool will only work if the links cannot be removed by yourself. It's not an automated tool. The links submitted will be reviewed. You must specify the reasons on why your are submitting the links to the disavow tool as well.

    The best way to get out of the penalty? Remove those unnatual links manually by sending link removal requests to the webmasters. Trust me. It took me eight reconsideration requests.
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    If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.

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  • Profile picture of the author SINROX
    I also have a Link Detox tool subscription that is ending on the 20th. If you need help on analyzing your website, PM me.
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    If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.

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  • Profile picture of the author Trabalhodigital
    The problem is (as I also saw in another forum thread) - some sites (my case) mannual penalty have lifted way too early. This penalty is lifted by humans. And when this happens, makes things quite confusing... Because by the google staff eyes we may have done an enough job , BUT, by the algorithm eyes, we did almost nothing. Having too much yet to do.
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