Disavow and link analysis
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Frankly the idea that a reputable company has to spend hard earned money asking people that boldly place a backlink on their site which were never requested is just wrong.
In 100% of cases I have seen, the company affected by the manipulative links is NOT reputable with respect to Google. To be clear, as I look to my penalized clients I do consider many of them to be reputable companies, but 100% of them have admitted they either knowingly built manipulative links, participated in some form of link scheme, or hired a SEO company who did such. Some clients share they had no idea what the SEO company was doing, but a reputable company needs to take accountability for the actions of their employees and those they decide to do business with.
I have seen companies claim to be attacked by competitors, but it is an exceptionally rare event. Mostly I find site owners who were unaware of the actions of a prior site owner, SEO, employee or who is simply not being honest.
Consider prior to 2012, negative seo via manipulative links hardly existed. Google only penalized a relatively miniscule number of sites for manipulative links in 2011. Why would anyone engage in an effort to penalize a competitor for manipulative links at a time when 99.9% of sites with manipulative links were able to get away with it? Yet if you look at the age of those manipulative links, you will likely find many are older than 2011.
Another consideration, over how long of a period of time were these links built? If you have a "good" site and then a sudden attack of negative SEO occurs, Google does not take any action. Rand proved this fact when he acquired millions of spammy links to SEOmoz earlier this year.
Again, it is not important what I believe but every indication shows this is what Google believes, and they are acting in this manner. Google has stated very clearly how the Disavow tool is to be used and it is clear many SEOs and site owners will disregard Google's advice which is fine. Keep in mind Google has already shared they will disregard Disavow submissions which they do not have confidence in.
Direct answers to your questions:
Do you think it is bad to list sites that might 404 but that show as 200 and ping but don’t pull up a site.
When I receive that result, I check the site with another browser. If I still receive the same result, the site is marked to check later. Keep in mind if you receive a 404 error today but the issue is resolved tomorrow, it will look to Google the same as if you skipped the site.
Will the site be penalized more for not figuring out which sites are currently active?
No. If you are going through this process your site is likely already penalized and/or impacted by Penguin. You will not be further penalized, but you are unlikely to have the current penalty removed if you miss active sites.
**I am inclined to simply disavow all sites that are not indexed in Google. See anything wrong with that? **
You are rolling the dice. It depends on why a site is not indexed. Whatever the reason, if it is resolved and Google sees the link, your Reconsideration Request will likely be denied and/or the Penguin issue will remain.
Here is the bottom line. Manipulative link penalties are designed to suppress the rankings of sites who have taken shortcuts rather than do the work required to earn links. I hope we can agree on that much.
The type of site owner and SEO who takes these short cuts typically tries to remove their penalty in the fastest / cheapest / easiest manner possible (i.e. taking more shortcuts). That is why many site owners are still upset their penalty has lasted 6+ months and there is no sign of it being lifted anytime soon. Many are jumping at the Disavow tool announcement with a complete misunderstanding of how the tool works or whom it benefits.
You can complain about Google's earning revenue with AdWords. You can be upset about the penalties being unfair. You may have very valid points but the bottom line is....unless Google's requirements for dealing with these issues are satisfied the choices are:
a) go out of business (which many have done)
b) lay off employees (which many have done)
c) accept lower traffic / pay for AdWords or generate traffic in other ways
d) move sites
The process of going to each link and determining which are manipulative versus organic really sucks. The same for emailing 1000s of domains asking them to remove links. There is no way to sugar coat this work. It takes hundreds of hours of trained personnel and it is the most unrewarding task in SEO. You are not building anything but rather cleaning up internet garbage. Nevertheless the choice has been very clear for the past year....do it or choose one of the 4 options above.
I know these words are likely not going to be well received. But I also know it is better to share the cold hard truth then try to sugar coat the situation when people are facing layoffs and business closures.
Best Wishes.
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I understand all your say and this company did pay for link farm nonsense. They did not know better. I suspect many of us dont know when our Doctor screws up. We dont have the training. A company 5 or 10 years ago paid for SEO and lazy SEO companies bought results on farms and got rich doing 1 hours work and charging $2k a month. Matt basicly acknoledges this on the vid and basicly says he understands and you should work to clean it up. Yes I know he says you made the mess so clean it up before you ask us to. I get it. I get it. I hate it but I get it.
It's not a perfect world, I get that but since the rules changed I think Google should just let people disavow and not pay all this money to try and get these links removed. That is my opinion. Everyone has one......or 100...LOL
So you think companies that have backlinks placed on porn sites deserver what they get and should have to clean it up. You think that is the responsibility of the reputable company that did nothing wrong. Yes this company unknowingly participated in link farm nonsense but has not done sor for at least 5 years and is still gettting these links and they are not criminal. They are hard working people that made a mistake.
Thasnks for the detailed anwers about your thoughts on the tool.
I guess what I will do is pick 20 of the really big scum bags from recent links and send an "Please ...Pretty please ...nice polite email and see what happens" I will leave off the deserved PS: You scum bag....get a life. It is just wrong....yea I know life is not fair.
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**So you think companies that have backlinks placed on porn sites deserver what they get and should have to clean it up. You think that is the responsibility of the reputable company that did nothing wrong. **
I never said nor thought that. You will find absolutely no judgment from me. My role as an advisor to you or any client is to provide the most complete and accurate information based on my knowledge and experience. If I were to allow my personal thoughts to get involved it would not be helpful to clients. It would be far easier for me to jump on the bandwagon and shout "evil Google" or "Google sucks". Instead I choose to take the actions which will serve clients best.
Google is a company. They have rules and guidelines. I work to understand those rules / guidelines / procedures as best as possible so I can produce the best results for my clients. Whether you choose white hat or black hat SEO, this aspect of SEO is the same. Where the line differs is I choose to use the knowledge and experience I acquire to stay within Google's Guidelines and maximize results for clients, whereas black hat SEO involves working outside of those guidelines.
Yes this company unknowingly participated in link farm nonsense but has not done sor for at least 5 years and is still gettting these links and they are not criminal. They are hard working people that made a mistake.
I agree our clients are hard working people. They have made mistakes. If there is one thing I have learned throughout a year of cleaning up these links is Google is intentionally issuing penalties / Penguin as a means of punishing those who have cheated the system. They clearly want these site owners to atone for their past actions by going through a very long and hard process. At every turn when site owners and SEOs attempt to take a short cut in the manipulative link removal process, Google puts up a road block. They could easily just devalue all the bad links (which they do anyway) but Google chooses to take further action. I understand the reasoning. If they simply discounted the bad links, then there is nothing to dissuade SEOs from building more bad ones. Google feels a harsher action is required.
The good news is the penalty can be fully removed along with the negative effects of Penguin. There is a long, hard process which must be followed to achieve that result.
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Thanks much for the dialogue. Yes some time it is hard for me to be as dispassionate about this subject since I help customers with all aspects
of their web presence. I don’t have 100s of customers and take a special interest in each one of them and get to know
them.Trust me I would try to be a little more articulate than “Google Sucks” if I really wanted to get into that futile black hole. If all I wanted to do was take a short cut and go for the perceived easy fix then I would have done that and not posted this and other posts I have made. I have learned that to go slowly it to go smartly when it comes to reacting to SEO issue. As a type A trust me this takes great restraint.
The tough thing as you know is that now this company has less sales and therefore less money to fix the mess.
I understand this past transgression has to be overcome but these recent links for porn sites and link farms are not my doing and truth be told those are the ones that have me mad.
There is only three reasons I can think for them
1. Ransom to remove the link. I have read that this is going on.
2. Competitive Bad SEO. I truly suspect there might be some of this by looking at the links from early 2012 and recently (pilling on)
3. Some perception that by linking to a site with decent PR that you life your scamy site up in the rankings.
With respect to taking the high road on getting links removed do you actually take the time to visit each site and look for a valid email address or do you simply send a mass email to webmaster@domain.com since all reputable sites should have either that or abuse@ as valid emails addresses and if they do not then shouldn’t that be enough effort spent to request links be removed?
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I typed a long response and the forum seems to have eaten it. I will briefly respond:
do you actually take the time to visit each site and look for a valid email address
Absolutely. We not only capture the email address but the contact form URL. If we are unsuccessful at reaching webmasters via their WHOIS email, site email and contact form we often take additional steps. For example, we report .com domains to ICANN so they can be recalled. We report bad blogs hosted on wordpress.com, blogspot.com, etc. We call and mail people using the info in WHOIS or their website. We chase people down on social networks. We have to be passionate in order to consistently be successful at removing these penalties. Any less effort means there will be times when we fail to remove a penalty which will cost our clients in lost sales over time.
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Ryan thanks again for all the discussion. I will huddle up with my client and see how he wants to proceed. My only doubt that this is what is needed to escape the penguin update is we did not receive the unnatural links notice from Google.
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...and neither did my first link removal client, but the penalty was revealed when I insisted that he needed to lodge a reconsideration request.
I have heard this story repeated over and over while talking to rmoov users over the past few months...I am quite sure there are way more people out there who are under a manual penalty than anyone realizes.
I have my own theory as to why this has happened, but that's probably for a blog post some time.
In a nutshell, I absolutely agree with Ryan's take on the subject except for one thing...hard earned experience does not in any way amount to bias.
Hope that helps,
Sha
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I suppose we would consider a reconsideration request if once these ugly backlinks are removed or disavowed the traffic does not return. It is tough to think that something that was done 6 years ago now has such a huge cost. I still think that if you are going to change such a fundamental rule (or finally actually inforce it might be a better way to put it) that you should allow people to simply reset their link profiles via the Disavow tool..... but hey .....no one is going to give me Matt's job anytime soon.
In the case of this site I watch the traffic fade starting the day of Penguin and it dropped more over the course of something like 5 days......It seems pretty clear Penguin implementation is the cause of the traffic lose also becuase long overdue deep on-page work did not help one bit.
Let the hours and hours of work begin....Ugh
I suppose one good thing about trying to get the links actaully removed is that traffic might start to recover during the effort as opposed to load up the disavow and wait. In that sense we will start with the most agregious sites first.
The one thing I am still puzzled about is the 2012 backlink that are so harmful. It is hard not to conclude this site is under attack by competitors. I know everyone like to say this is rare but hey if you are being attacked then for your the stat is 100% ...not rare......why else would really scummy sites be backlinking to this site. Please someone tell me a reason other than the 3 I have describe in this thread.
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Can you share an example of these links which were created in 2012 and you feel are the result of an attack? Are you 100% certain neither the client nor any agent (family member, employee, developer, etc) working on the client's behalf had any part in the creation of these links?
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**Here are a few examples that came right from the Google recent export from the webmaster tools and were links identified in Oct. **
There are several possibilities. A page could have been blocked via robots.txt and have since been unblocked. A page could have had the "noindex" tag applied and now it has been removed.
Another possibility is issues with the site architecture. A page could have been buried deep or existing as an island page, but now the navigation is fixed and the link is found.
In order to investigate further, I would need the URL to the actual web page which contains the link to your target site, along with the URL of the site. I need to be able to find the link on the page and use other tools to determine the link's age.
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Hi JW,
There are lots of reasons you could be seeing links like this.
I have seen entire websites with hundreds of pages suddenly appear with links to a client's site and even been able to find references to a competitor amongst the hundreds of harmful linking URLs. While this was ringing every "negative SEO" bell for me initially, after careful investigation it became obvious that it was in fact some random person who decided to capitalize on a valuable niche by creating a site using hundreds of spammy articles that had since been deleted from directories by my client and their competitor...
Webmasters have long tried to get exposure for sites by adding links and clicking them or injecting referral data into server logs in the hope that curious site owners will click the referral link to check out the referring site.There are also quite a number of posts out there suggesting that linking out to quality sites can help rankings...as a result there are also people out there with poor sites who are trying to use this to improve their situation.
Most important of all, it is well known that data offered by Google through WMT is notoriously out of date ... I have seen several instances where newly surfaced links have been in place for more than a year.
If there is a mantra to adopt when working on link removals, I would say it is "nothing is ever as it seems".
Hope that helps,
Sha
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Thanks to the both of you for your help. Sorry for the tardy reply as I was in transit. The client has agreed for us to try and contact these sites and request link removal. If that does not work then we will put a disavow list together and try to get this link profile repaired. Then we will work harder on some quality links.
It is still hard to swallow that a practice that was once rewarded now requires money to fix....guess we will just caulk that one up to "Life isn't always fair".
I am just going to take Google Recent, Majestic SEO, and Site Explorer put them all together and get to work.
Ryan if you can share the name of the tool that would might give me a better handle on the actual age of the link that would be great. I don't really want to share the links publicly and have my client to get 100 of calls. If you are really curious I can PM details to you.
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Hi JW,
I do not personally use any tools to measure a link's age. Google has a new export available in WMT which shows this information as well as several other tools. I have never encountered a situation where a link's age has been relevant to link removal.
With the above noted, a link tool can only tell you the first time the tool discovered the link. Links can be much older than the discovery date for a variety of reasons.
For your backlink report, I highly advise including Bing and AHREFs as well. Otherwise, you will be missing numerous links.
With respect to identifying links, it is my experience most SEO professionals are not aligned with Google when it comes to evaluating a manipulative vs organic link. A few quick tips:
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The PR / PA / DA of a web page should not be a consideration when making a determination of organic vs manipulative
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The anchor text is also not a factor. Here you may say "wait a minute! Penguin specifically detects anchor text". What I mean is...if you change the anchor text on a link to simply a URL, the link itself is no less manipulative.
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99%+ of general directories are manipulative in my experience. Most niche directories are manipulative as well in my experience.
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Most press releases are manipulative as well
There are tons of other examples and you need to refer to Google's Guidelines and ask yourself "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?
Best wishes
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My plan was to use your last statement as my approach. "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"? Said perfectly. Does it mean I will remove some good links....well maybe but if google is not indexing a site then I suspect it is not giving me juice anyway and there are tons of links that google is not indexing. This site does have some nice links so hopefully cleaning this up will get the site out the the box where penguins are stored.
I used netpeak for these status....great tool but worried me a tad as Malwarebytes blocks some outgoing traffic that tool is trying to send to their web site. I assume just stat info and not the content of my hard drive....LOL
Thanks for the bing and AHREFs thoughts. I will go grab them also, netpeak them and pull them in to the ACCESS database where I am making a superset list of junk. Unformtualy the list is something on the order of 1000 links. Give are take a few.
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So when I finally get around to disavowing some of these links should I include domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site. That is to say the links are no longer active. The reason I ask is there are many like that which are sites which were obvious link farms.....so it google holding those against the site even though those site are no longer active...... I could create a section in the disavow..and comment label it something like
OLD links that show up using various tools but no longer seem to function but we are including in order to make sure the link profile of this site is clean.
????
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should I [disavow] domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site
No. The purpose of the disavow tool is to separate your site from active links which you are unable to remove.
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Cool....I will stick to the ones we found that are not natrual if we dont get a reponce to remove.... I am still going to be amazed if any of these sites repond but out of 52k links I almost have the list of domains to contact. Stuck the exports into a Microsfot Access DB which makes them easier to click and categories.
Cheers
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Ryan what do you think about directories like this
I don't think they pass the smell test but some do have thousands of pages index at google and even have PR from 1 to 4 on a few of them.
These are kind of like dmoz (a good idea turned joke IMHO).
My inclination is to request an unlink because I personally think that any site that just lists sites should be nuked from the internet.
I have been making as bad any site that has a submit your link or other such button in the top menu bar.
jw
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