Does Disavowing Links Work in 2019?
Is there any benefit to using Google’s disavow tool if you do not have a manual action? In this article, we will discuss some case studies of sites that appear to have benefitted from disavowing a large number of links previously made for SEO reasons. We will also share some cases in which site owners saw drops in traffic that we feel are related to not filing a disavow.
If your site has been actively involved in link building, you may want to consider reviewing these links thoroughly. Ask yourself whether the links you were getting truly were recommendations for your site. Or, were the majority of links built, primarily there for the purpose of improving Google rankings? There is a possibility that this history of building links to try and improve rankings could be causing your site to be considered less trustworthy by Google. If so, filing a thorough disavow could help remove this distrust and your site could see improved rankings.
What is the disavow tool?
Google’s disavow tool is something that site owners can use to ask Google to ignore some links that are pointing to your website. Each link that points to a site carries signals with it. Some of those signals can be good. For example, if an authoritative and trustworthy site recommends your content via a followed link, that usually sends Google good signals. But, other links can send Google bad signals if they are links that contradict Google’s recommendations.
If you have enough low quality link signals, this can theoretically cause the site to have difficulty ranking at its full potential on Google searches. In this article we will discuss what Google has recommended in regards to disavowing. We’ll give some evidence to show that unnatural links still can cause problems for a site algorithmically, even in the age of Penguin 4.0. You will read some case studies describing sites that have filed a disavow and have subsequently seen improvements. You’ll also see some sites that did not file a disavow, against our recommendations, and subsequently have seen losses in traffic.
Our goal is to help you determine whether your site could benefit from filing a disavow. We are excited about some of the results that we have been seeing recently after disavowing. While we can’t promise that every site that disavows will see improvements, it is our opinion that if a site has a history of making links primarily for the sake of improving rankings, those links can be hindering your ability to rank. Disavowing those links can help.
Just starting to learn about the disavow tool?
If you are new to understanding the disavow tool we would recommend the following resources:
Your Start-to-Finish Guide to using Google’s disavow tool - This post is almost five years old now, but still quite relevant and helpful.
Disavowing in 2019 and beyond - Written in February of 2019, this article describes in great detail our thoughts on why unnatural links can hurt a site algorithmically even in the age of Penguin 4.0.
Google: Disavowing Bad Links May Help Google Algorithmically Trust Your Links - Information from Search Engine Round Table on disavowing in 2019
7 Things You May Not Know About Google’s Disavow Tool - Did you know there is a size limit to the disavow file? This document contains some interesting things you may not know about using this tool.
Do we need to disavow since Penguin 4.0? Doesn’t Google just ignore unnatural links now?
In September of 2016, when Google came out with version Penguin 4.0, the general consensus amongst SEOs was that unnatural links could now only hurt a site if the site received a manual action from Google’s webspam team. Several Google employees made statements on social media to indicate that Penguin would no longer be demoting spam algorithmically. Rather, they felt confident in their abilities to ignore links that were made just for the purpose of manipulating Google rankings.
For a while, following the release of Penguin 4.0, MHC only recommended filing a disavow for sites that had received a manual action for unnatural links. We felt that Google would simply ignore unnatural links in their algorithmic calculations.
It turns out this is not completely correct.
In February of 2019, Google’s John Mueller shared some interesting news with us, telling us that there can be a benefit for some sites to disavow unnatural links, even if they did not have a manual action.
When asked whether unnatural links could hurt a site algorithmically, John said:
“That can definitely be the case. So it’s something where our algorithms when we look at it and they see, oh, there are a bunch of really bad links here. Then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to the links in general for the website. So if you clean that up, then the algorithms look at it and say, oh, there’s– there’s kind of– it’s OK. It’s not bad.”
But wait? Google told us that they are ignoring unnatural links, right?
Actually, what Google has told us is that the Penguin algorithm ignores unnatural links. But...there are likely other algorithms that Google can use to assess link quality. This is what we currently believe at MHC in regards to how Google handles links:
- Ultra spammy links like comment spam, forum link blasts, spammy image directory links, etc. are likely completely removed from all of Google’s link calculations.
- If a site has a small number of links that don’t line up with Google’s guidelines re link schemes, those links are likely ignored by Google’s link quality algorithms.
- If a site has enough links that don’t line up with Google’s guidelines, then it can trigger some sort of distrust which has the potential to strongly impact your ability to rank for YMYL queries.
We spoke in our article on the importance of scientific consensus in medical sites about how important trust is in Google’s algorithms. We do believe that Google has many factors that they multiply together in some form, to get a quality score for each website. We also believe that one, or perhaps several of those factors deal with the level of trust that Google has in your site. If one of those trust factors is lacking, then this could result in your quality score being multiplied by a decimal, which has the potential to greatly reduce your score.
The actual calculations Google performs are likely more complicated than simply multiplying scores together. If you would like to read more about the types of calculations that could be used in determining trust, we would encourage you to read this Stanford paper published in 2004 called Combating Web Spam with TrustRank. While TrustRank is not an actual Google patent, it shows the types of calculations that could be done to determine trust for a page on the web.
The point in writing about this is not to explain exactly how Google determines trust, but rather to show that it can be done programmatically. We believe that there are many factors that can contribute to Google’s assessment of trust. We have outlined several described in the Quality Raters’ Guidelines in this article on the September 27 core Google update. One of the most important components of trust that Google can measure is link quality.
August 22-29, 2019 (and likely September 13) were possibly big link related Google updates
Each week, the team at MHC does what we call, “Algo checks”. Each of our auditors review the analytics for every client they have had, past and present, and comments on any significant changes in Google organic traffic trajectories. We look at seasonality and other factors to try and determine whether there is an obvious reason for traffic to go either up or down.
A pattern that we noticed recently was that quite a few of our clients were seeing increases in traffic, and a small number were seeing decreases, all between the time of August 22-29, 2019. The interesting thing that we noted though was that each of the sites that saw a change significant enough for us to report on had some type of issue with unnatural links.
We believe that Google made changes to their algorithm at this time in how they assess link trust. While there may be other elements of trust that were reassessed by Google at this time, if you were hit at this time, we would strongly recommend having a thorough look at the quality of your link profile. Near the end of this article you will read our recommendations on what types of links to look for and how to determine whether you may benefit from filing a disavow.
Could this link related change be related to Google’s new rel=nofollow news?
Google told us recently that they are making some changes to how they handle nofollowed links. You can read more here on our take on this. Some have speculated that the ranking changes we saw with the August 22-29 updates could be related to this change. We do not think this is the case.
It is our understanding that the main change Google made is that they now can choose whether or not to pass PageRank through a link that is nofollowed. This may mean that some sites that have a large number of nofollowed links from truly authoritative sites could start to see some benefit from those links. However, it really shouldn’t cause sites to see significant drops, unless perhaps a competitor benefited from big gains.
You will see in the case studies below that some sites that we identified as having unnatural links, that did not file a disavow saw some significant declines in this time period.
Disavow case studies
Medical information site
This site is a YMYL site that provides users with important health information. The site had not seen drops in conjunction with core updates, but has struggled to rank for quite some time now.
Disavow work done
The MHC team audited this site’s links and identified over 700 domains which contained links that we felt Google would consider unnatural links. This site had a large number of links that we classified as “article for links”. Many of these links were what many SEO’s sell under the guise of content marketing. While we believe that many aspects of content marketing are good, if you are sending content to publishers with the main intention of gathering links that pass PageRank, there is a strong possibility that these links are doing more harm than good.
Here is a section of our link auditing spreadsheet for this site. Yes...we still audit links manually. The “CLASS” on every link below has been manually decided by an MHC auditor. It takes forever, but in our opinion, it is by far the best way to be accurate.
We also disavowed some spammy links that every site gets. While these are unlikely to cause ranking suppressions, there is no harm in throwing them in a disavow file.
For this site, we recommended disavowing over 50% of their link profile. The site owner agreed despite the fact that they had spent a large amount of time and money in building those links.
Their traffic increases are spectacular:
It is often hard to prove that filing a disavow was the sole reason for a site to see traffic increases. We believe that in the above case, the disavow truly was what propelled this site to better rankings. While we did recommend a number of site quality improvements, the site owner has not yet implemented those changes. The only change made to this site was filing an extremely thorough and aggressive disavow.
Service area business
This site is another interesting case study because all that they contracted us to do is audit their links and file a disavow. We have not advised on additional quality improvements for this website.
We recommended disavowing about 800 domains which represented almost half of their link profile. A large number of these were links that we classified again, as “article for links”. These were links that were in articles that their former SEO company had shopped out to websites. While some would try to argue that these were editorial mentions, in reality these articles would not have been written or published if it weren’t for the links they contained. We also disavowed a number of low quality directory links and spammy links as well just to be safe.
This site started to see improvements within a couple of months of filing a disavow. They see improvements with most core quality updates, and other updates that we at MHC think were link related.
Informational site
This site had us do a site quality review for them. We noted in the link section of their review that there were a large number of links from guest posts that likely Google would see as unnatural. We did not do a full link by link audit for this site as they had a list of the links that they had created from guest posting. This site filed their own disavow, and saw increases starting August 22, 2019.
We have several other sites in our profile that are showing nice increases following filing a disavow. We haven’t shared them all as several are sites for which we have signed an NDA and also, quite a few have implemented many changes to their site that could help improve Google’s assessment of quality. In those cases it can be challenging to say that the increases seen are completely caused by the disavow work.
Sites that saw drops
The most interesting part of our investigation was when we looked at sites that we had recommended disavowing a large number of domains, who did not file a disavow. In our site quality reviews, what we do is spend several hours reviewing a site’s link profile to determine whether a link by link audit and subsequent disavow would be likely to help them.
For the site listed below, the client provided us with a list of links made for them by their PR firm. It was our opinion that the majority of these, if not all, would be seen by Google as paid, unnatural links, created to manipulate Google rankings. The site owner elected not to disavow these links. They saw significant drops starting August 22, 2019, the date on which we feel Google made an update to how they assess link quality:
The next site is a lead gen site. It has some significant quality issues. We have just recently begun to work with this site and the site owner will hopefully be instituting some of our advised changes soon. This site has a large number of keyword anchored links that appeared to us to be unnatural. We are in the process of auditing this site’s links and have not yet filed a disavow.
The next site is another one that had unnatural links but did not file a disavow. The links were mostly self made links in articles. While this site’s drop is not dramatic, we are anticipating we can reverse it by doing a full link audit and filing a disavow.
Again, we have other examples (that we do not have permission to share) that show similar patterns where we have recommended filing a disavow and they did not and subsequently saw drops in Google organic traffic around August 22-29 or September 13, 2019.
What can we conclude after looking at the above sites?
We recognize that we are making some important recommendations based on results that we are seeing with just a small handful of sites. Our hope, now that more site owners are being convinced that disavow work can still help, is that we will have more exciting case studies to share with you in the future. For now though, we really do feel that there is enough evidence to support the possibility that Google has made some changes to how they assess link quality.
We are not the only ones seeing benefits to disavowing.
Stephen Kenwright posted this traffic graph of a site that added 500 domains to their disavow and is now seeing nice changes.
https://twitter.com/stekenwright/status/1173302419989716994?s=20
And here is a nice success story posted by TJ Robertson.
Thanks! We did some minor optimizations, but nothing big. I submitted the disavow file mid-July. Here's our weekly search traffic, via @Moz pic.twitter.com/xGHShvWRoN
— TJRobertsonSEO (@SeoRobertson) September 12, 2019
FAQ about disavowing in 2019
How can I tell whether filing a disavow could help me?
You will hear different answers to this question depending on who you ask. We do not recommend using an automated tool to tell you whether you have unnatural links pointing to your site. John Mueller has said in the past that if a tool can tell you which links to disavow, Google is likely ignoring those.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1074693069616898049?s=20
If you have either paid an SEO company in the past to build links for you, or have built your own links, the quality of those links should be assessed. Ask yourself, honestly, the following questions:
- If the links in this post were nofollowed, would there still be an obvious benefit to our company?
- Would someone reading this post truly believe that the website that is linking to us is recommending our content, our business, or our authors?
- Would I feel comfortable showing the webspam team how I went about acquiring links?
If you’ve got a little bit of a gut check after reading those bullet points, we would urge you to consider having your links audited. If you are interested in having an MHC team member’s opinion on whether your links are likely to be seen as unnatural, our link overview plan, may be of help.
Deciding on disavowing links that you have spent months, or perhaps years, and a lot of money creating, is not a task to take lightly. You may also want to cross reference your Google organic traffic across our list of known and suspected algorithm updates to see if you have drops that happened in conjunction with a suspected link related update. If so, this is more evidence to support the possibility that self made links are causing Google to distrust your site and suppress your rankings.
Should we be disavowing all guest posting and content marketing links?
The answer to this depends on scale, intent, and the quality of your links. Here are some general guidelines we use, but keep in mind that every case is individual:
- If there are guest posting and content marketing posts that contain keyword anchored links to your own site, then these are top priority to disavow.
- If you have a large number of links, (whether or not they are keyword anchored,) that come from a relationship that your SEO company has with publishing companies, consider disavowing. It is likely not challenging for Google to detect which publishers are regularly trading links for content.
- Look at the traffic to pages that you have done this kind of link building for. Did traffic increase shortly after getting these links? If yes, then they could be considered as good by Google. If you got a large number of guest posting/content marketing links to a particular piece of content and you did not see increases in ranking/traffic for those pages, then most likely Google is detecting these as unnatural links. At best, they are likely ignoring those links. At worst, they could contribute to a lower assessment of trust for your site and impede your ability to rank.
Please note that we are not saying that all guest posting and content marketing is bad. Guest posting can be a great way to make a name for yourself or your company. When I, Marie, guest post on an authoritative SEO site, this is good for business. There are so many benefits outside of the link that we might receive.
Content marketing, done correctly, should be done with a primary goal of raising awareness for your company and driving business. We find that many businesses say, “We publish these articles so that we can spread the word about how amazing this company is,” when in reality, the main purpose for publishing many articles is to build links, and often on a large scale.
How long does it take to see improvements in traffic after filing a disavow?
In our experience, if a site is going to benefit from filing a disavow, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to see the uplift. What we tend to see is that the site will suddenly see an increase that corresponds with a quality update. Our theory is that link quality is a component of site trust. With quality updates, Google likely reassesses trust scores.
It is also important to note, that we have not seen any cases that we can recall, where disavowing spammy links alone resulted in increases in traffic. The sites that we are seeing nice gains in are ones that were extremely aggressive in finding and disavowing links that were purposely made in an attempt to improve Google rankings.
It should also be noted that the sites that we saw improvements for after disavowing, were ones that also had good, natural links pointing to their site, alongside of the self made, unnatural ones.
Should you use an automated tool to help you do a link audit?
We do think that some of the automated link auditing tools are great for helping to locate your links, and organize them in a way that allows you to do a manual audit. However, we do not recommend relying at all on an automated tool’s determination of whether or not a link is unnatural. Remember, we quoted John Mueller above as saying, “if some random tool can tell you which ones to disavow, they're probably already being ignored.”
The only sites that we have seen make nice improvements following disavow work are those for which we have been extremely thorough in assessing each link manually and deciding whether it is one that Google would likely see as unnatural. In our experience, the tools are all decently good at finding ultra-spammy links, but often struggle to find patterns of the types of self made links that can cause Google to distrust your site.
Want to hire us to review your links?
At MHC, we are quite proud of the work we do in regards to disavowing. Marie and her team have removed hundreds of manual actions and have seen many of Google’s examples of unnatural links given in response to reconsideration requests. Over the years, we were one of the few companies to publish case studies on Penguin recoveries. Since 2012, we have pored over every word Google employees and Google documents have said on the subject of understanding how Google deals with unnatural links.
Here is more information on MHC’s link audit and link overview plans.
Our goal is always to help. We offer two services for link auditing. The most comprehensive is a full link by link audit. We gather links from many sources, create a spreadsheet containing one link from every domain, and then our team manually reviews each one. We make assessments and look for unnatural linking patterns. We then share our findings with you so that together, we can make the final decision on what to disavow. We will then file your disavow for you.
If you are not certain whether you need a link audit, you can order our link overview service. For this, an MHC team member will spend several hours spot checking links and looking for obvious patterns of unnatural linking. We’ll cross reference this against your disavow to see if you are correctly disavowing these links.
In many cases, when we do a link overview, our advice to the client is that further disavow work is unlikely to help. If we do feel that filing a disavow could help your site, we can give you a quote to have us do a thorough link audit and disavow.
Your thoughts?
Have you had success with disavowing? If so, what types of links did you disavow? When did you see the uplift in traffic? We would love to hear your thoughts below.
Comments
Interesting post Marie!
I am quite surprised that in your first example, the site had nice spike in traffic just 2 weeks after the disavow. The general assumption that it can takes many weeks (or months) to see any result. As far as I understand the disavow only really takes effect after Google re crawl all the sites that have been removed.
I know that a disavow works quite quickly for manual actions. But it could take many weeks / months for an algorithmic changes.
It’s interesting to note that in your second example, the site only saw improvement after many weeks. So it does seem like an inconsistent behavior.
Really nice artilce!
HI Marie.
Another insightful read as always. One of my UK based YMYL clients had two big drops in rankings and traffic around June 4th and then July 27th.
Both of these seemed to align with algorithm updates (there or thereabouts) but I also discovered they had been on the receiving end of a negative SEO attack.
After manually reviewing nearly 1000 links, I disavowed 687 domains on August 21st (have added a few more since taking the total over 700). I also made some website content improvements on the weeks after.
Today I have seen huge increases in rankings and increase in traffic. I’ve been trying to figure out if it was the bulk link disavowing or the core Google algorithm that is currently rolling out. After reading this post, I’m leaning more towards the disavowing.
Be interesting to hear other people’s experiences and thoughts on the above?
Thanks for sharing Anthony. This is an interesting case as Google has recently said that disavowing links is unlikely to help a site that has seen hits with core updates.
Still, I do think that the disavow likely has helped your site. That said, if your increase started September 24(ish), there was a big update on that date too.
Hello Marie! Thanks for your work, you’ve been an example for our SEO community. From our agency disavows experience, traffic recover takes usually a bit longer than the graphs you posted. I’d say some months. May ask you if it happens often to you to add a domain on a disavow file that Google still didn’t crawl, and then it starts to show on GSC until it gets disavowed? Theoretically, that could harm the site, right?
Thank you for your kind words Ticiano.
We used to say that it generally takes 2+ months to see the benefits of a good disavow. We had several that were quicker than this though and saw improvements with what we think was a link update starting August 21. I think the speed of recovery for some sites depends on whether or not the site is being suppressed by Google and if so, whether that suppression is one that can only be lifted when Google re-runs that part of the algorithm.
Regarding domains that are not in GSC, we still do recommend using links from multiple sources as not every unnatural link will be shown in GSC. We’re more likely to find them if we use links from Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz as well. With that said, for some sites with massive link profiles we are just now starting to look at just the GSC links. For those sites we’ll recommend ongoing reviews of the new links that appear in GSC, so it will be interesting to see how many old links start to resurface.
Noticed that your GA screenshots under the case study section are of ‘All Users’. I think this muddies the data water a bit and leaves some room for suspicion of the validity of these case studies. I’d love to see these screenshots segmented with organic traffic only… or even better, Google traffic only. Thoughts?
If you look above “All users” you’ll see that the traffic is segmented to show just Google organic traffic.
Marie,
Thanks a ton for this article I found it to be really informative. I started diging into things a week or so ago after I noticed we saw a dip in traffic just after the Sep 13th update and then an even larger dip around -8% after the core update on the 24th.
We have never done article marketing, or link building. We really do not even look for backlinks. We have a lot of backlinks as an ecommerce site. SEM Rush states we have around 589 toxic domains pointing towards our site. (I know you mentioned not using tools as a basis to dertermine if a link is toxic or not) I have always ignored these based on Googles feedback, that they know bad links and just devalue or ignore them.
However from my digging in it looks like we might have been devalued based on our link profile. Perhaps it is just not good enough, but it made me wonder if it would be a good idea to look into some of these links from bad neighborhoods and disavow them. The previous two core updates (March and June) were both really good for our website. So we are left pretty puzzled as to why this one was so rough on us especially considering we have not made any drastic site changes in the interim. Do you have any studies where you hit the disavow file hard on links that were not created by link building type tactics but are more likely scrapers. For example, we have some links from sites like bestwebsites on the web with a link to our site. The domain is flagged as suspicious by basically all tools.
We do have a lot of forum links from customers talking about products we sell. Things like checkout this great deal on tires then linking to our website or the specific product detail page. We do not post any of those links they just come from forum discussions about vehicles things like that.
I am uncertain if it is even worth trying to battle some of these bad links.
I’d have to see the link profile to say for sure, but it doesn’t sound like the disavow tool is the key to your recovery. While we have seen some fantastic improvements after disavowing, it’s always been for sites that clearly have been building links for SEO. No harm in disavowing those spam links, but I would be surprised if it helped.
With most core updates, the issue is some (or multiple) aspect of E-A-T.
Hey Marie, You have shared an important topic in SEO. By Disavowing links on any website that improves trustworthy of a website. Google webmaster is the best tool to disavow which is harming your website. I used this tool and got success. Thanks.
Disavowing links still work in 2019, there was a time I disavowed some links for our clients and they small a huge spike in traffic. However, a friend of mine in the same industry said it didn’t work for him. So what can I say whether it still works or not? If it worked for me, then disavowing links stills works
This is why it is often challenging to talk about whether the disavow tool can help. One site could disavow thousands of spammy links that Google is already ignoring and likely would not see a change. Another might disavow a small handful of in-article links that they purposely made to try and manipulate rankings and they may see nice improvements. You definitely need to know which links to disavow in order for the tool to be effective.
Hi Marie – great article. It’s good to see a bit of evidence being used to reinforce best practice in this area – disavowing links isn’t a very exciting process and it’s good to see it can have a positive impact on our clients websites.
I have a quick question. We’ve taken over a site from another agency and it’s previously had literally hundreds of incoming links from now non-live domains. I assuming this is the result of some form of black hat link building effort in the distant past. I’m using the SEMR Backlink Audit tool integrated with Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Majestic to source the site’s backlinks.
The question is: do you recommend disavowing domains that are no longer live? My gut says no, but I’m interested in your viewpoint.
If we’re already doing a link audit for a site and we come across links like this, we’ll throw them in the disavow. But, most likely Google is already ignoring them.
If the links are no longer live then they will not affect you. The concern though is that some of these spammy links will go offline for days and then suddenly resurface. Even then though, the links that we disavow that we feel are really helping are those that you purposely made to help improve PageRank.
Hi Marie
Great post but I have a question. One of the sites I’m managing, cryptotapas.com has had a history of bad linking (all paid bad links sent to the site by previous SEOs).
So severe that recently, as soon as I took up the SEO for the site, I had to disavow about 8000 of these unnaturally generated links.
But the day after I have disavowed the links, I saw a steep drop in traffic from 300-400 visits a day to just 50-60 visits a day.
Is this normal? Will the traffic bounce back or is there anything else that I need to do? Any answer is appreciated
If you’ve disavowed the wrong links, this could in theory cause a traffic drop. However, it would be unusual, in my experience for this drop to be so sudden and dramatic. If your drop happened recently, I’d check to see if it lines up with any of the dates on which we have noted possible or confirmed algorithm updates:
https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/
Otherwise, it may be a good idea to have another person review the disavow you filed to see if perhaps you have disavowed some links that Google truly was counting as good ones.
Hello Marie,
These are very useful posts. Thanks a lot.
In your start-to-finish guide you write that a link to one’s site is disavowed when Google recrawls the page from which it is coming.
I have noticed a lot of spammy links coming from hundreds of sites that are unreachable or marked as parked when I try to visit them (e.g., eddiecheever.net), yet their pages always remain in Google Search. It appears the site owners periodically give Google a chance to crawl some of their pages and then change the DNS. DNS for almost all of these is managed in Cloudfare.
Also, these sites tend to have thousands of pages.
I am wondering how the disavow tool can be effective against these at all or what else can be done?
If you need more of these sites, I’d be happy to send you an email.
Many thanks for taking the time.
If we’re doing a link audit and we see spammy sites that don’t resolve, we usually throw them in the disavow tool. But, we don’t put too much effort into making sure we find all of these spammy sites. We’re quite certain Google is ignoring them anyhow.
For the sites that we feel we have helped with disavowing, we do not feel that the improvements can be attributed to disavowing spam. Rather, it’s when we disavow links that were purposely made for SEO that helps.
Hello Marie,
Thank your very much for your fast reply.
I can see your point that disavowing links that were part of an seo link scheme can be very beneficial.
We have, however, never built any such links. In fact, we haven’t built any links at all.
Prior to a substantial drop in traffic in September, we have noticed a large number of spam links pointing to pages on our site appearing. Almost all of them are unreachable and have switched their DNS.
This may be a coincidence of course.
The easiest explanation though is: these spammers keep doing it because it often works for them. These sites remain in Google Index for months on end and keep adding pages and links.
It is crazy how many pages some of these sites have indexed. Must be a huge resource hog for Google as well.
And if I understand your explanation correctly than disavow may be of limited usefulness against them because their pages are mostly unreachable and hence won’t be reindexed.
I suspect they may operate that way to purposefully circumvent the disavow tool.
Many thanks for the good information you are sharing.
All the best.
Very interesting finds. I have done two disavows this past year. Those sites bringing more than 1k links. I will post results later. So far I’m not seeing huge changes.
The guest posting section is interesting since some sites now are relying exclusively on outreach and guestposts since they think this is the natural whitehat way to go and you are stating its quite the opposite.
When you submit a disavow did you find you had to submit it for all properties http,https,www,nonwww ?
You really should only have to submit to the canonical version. However, it is best practice to submit to all versions you have verified in GSC just to be sure.
Merci pour cet article détailler en profondeur ; J’ai fais pleins de découvertes.
You’re very welcome, happy to hear that!
This definitely has to be used carefully, let’s say you disavowed some sites you didn’t want to. Who knows how long it takes so google will reverse this process?