Does Link Detox Boost Work?
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That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago.
Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product. Sounds great doesn't it? Maybe even sounds too good to be true. Well, here is my experience with it.
We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now. While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change. So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible.
This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers. The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them.
So we ran it and it was NOT cheap. Roughly $300. Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course.
The results. No change at all. Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning.
Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them.
Anyone else use this product? What were your results?
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Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...
I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"? Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?
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Nobody knows. I have heard some different theory's involving the "fetch as google bot" tools.
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Nothing attracts a spider like new pages and new links, especially if there's a new page saying; "Woohoo, I'm over hEEeeeeAaaaRRrrrrr!" I would imagine the 'boost' is a sophisticated way of doing just that. But if it works something like that, it works counter to what Google is trying to accomplish. I would imagine the system was bound for breakdown at some point.
However, let's say the boost works just fine. That means there's definitely something else going on. I've seen rankings loses due to scrapers employing rel=canonical along with a ton of links (all bad links, of course). It's not supposed to work, but it does happen. Have you ran the hardest hit pages through plagiarism checkers?
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It's not possible to remove a Penguin issue in 3 days even if you have managed to get Google to crawl and disavow all of the links on your disavow file. This is because you won't be able to escape Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. AND...in order to see a dramatic recovery like the Link Detox graph shows, you'd have to have a site that has a really good base of good links underneath the low quality links. Most sites with Penguin issues will not see a dramatic recovery...and if they do, again, it would almost always be on the date of a Penguin refresh.
However, the Link Detox tool is describing a manual penalty, not Penguin. (However, they're a bit misleading saying it "speeds up recovery from a Google Penalty". Officially Google will tell you that Penguin is not a penalty, but simply an algorithmic change, but most webmasters would tell you that Penguin is a penalty.)
If it's a manual penalty, then you don't need to have the links in your disavow file crawled in order to lift your penalty and if this is the case then the "boost" that they are talking about won't really help get a penalty lifted. Within 24 hours of filing your disavow, the webspam team is able to see what is in the file. When they review your request for reconsideration, they check to see if you have disavowed the right links. It doesn't matter if those links have not been visited and thus disavowed yet.
Is it possible to lift a manual penalty in 3 days like Link Detox's website suggests? Yes. I've had it done. We once filed for reconsideration and three days later we had a response saying that our penalty was revoked. But, out of the hundreds of requests that I have filed, I've only ever once had Google respond that quickly. Most requests are taking 4 weeks to get a response back right now. Is it possible to have such a dramatic recovery as the graph shows? Yes, if you have a sitewide manual penalty and your penalty gets lifted, AND you have a good base of natural links then some sites can show a dramatic improvement. But, again, it has nothing to do with getting your disavowed links crawled faster.
I think that tools like Link Detox can have some value in helping site owners (but as I have always said, they don't replace the need for a manual audit.) But, I have to say that I am concerned about the way that they're marketing this tool. I think there could be some value, if you have a Penguin hit site, in getting your disavowed links crawled faster. It's conceivably possible that if you didn't, then Penguin could refresh and your disavowed urls have not been visited and therefore are not disavowed. But, the way that they've marketed it it sounds like any site that uses this tool can have top rankings again within 3 days of using it and that's quite misleading.
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Dave,
Thanks for asking this question....we have been waiting for some positive review on this tool to pull the trigger for a while.
I would say that even a small recovery would make us more than happy to use the tool. No need for major changes.
For now we have been using RMOOV to manage the manual removal requests to webmasters and Link Detox to identify and classify our incoming links.
I agree with Marie that only time and hard work will get us there. But, again...if Link Detox Boost is capable of expediting the recovery even just a bit...I am in.
Luciano
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I have been doing exactly what you have. Rmoov, link detox reports, manual review etc.
I think the link detox boost was 12 credits.. or around $300.
You have to decide if that is wroth it for you or your clients. For me, after this experience, I wouldn't use it again.
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I do understand the skeptical attitude here. Anyway we have many clients sending us success stories that the Link Detox Boost works, but unfortunately they are afraid of publishing their success of a penalty removal because they don’t want to get into the focus of attention.
Nevertheless we could even confirm that the Link Detox Boost works not only for manual actions but also for algorithmic problems, like Penguin. The client disavowed ~40% of his links on Friday, got the Link Detox Risk down to 207, ran Link Detox Boost on Monday, and had an almost instant jump of 20 positions.
And that just not the only one.
We are working on detailed case study that should go live very soon.
The Link Detox Boost works and speeds up the disavow process significantly, if the users have done everything correctly.
As Marie has pointed out already it is really important to a really good base of good links underneath the low quality link to rank again. So even if you have disavowed a lot of URLs and boosted them (and they have been recrawled), then it can happen that you don’t see a recovery.
While boosting will speed up the whole disavow process for Google, it can still have many reasons why the Link Detox Boost does not work as expected for a penalty in a specific case.
You need to look into your link profile in more detail to find the answers, especially if you work with the Link Research Tools, you can check the link profile with DTOX and CLA easily:
- Do you have disavowed enough bad links? How does your Link Detox Risk score look like?
- Have you disavowed all suspicious and toxic links? Quite often people disavow too few links because they want to hold on to stronger links that cost them a lot in the past… wrong way
- Did you upload your WMT file and other backlink source files in the Link Detox report to be sure that no links get lost?
- Have you used the DTOX tool correctly (including the MUST DO steps)? http://help.linkdetox.com/m/link-detox-step-by-step-guide - Have you received more bad backlinks in the last days or weeks? Please re-run your Link Detox to be sure or start a Link Alert. Could be a negative SEO issue or simply forgotten to upload GWT link data
- Have you disavowed domains or pages? It is recommended to disavow the domains.
- Have you boosted all URLs which you have disavowed?
- Have all links been re-crawled already? You can check this by using the reprocessing button in your report. This is free.
- Do you have enough good backlinks to rank again?
- Do you have any unnatural tops in your link profile, even when you clean up your report? Start a CLA report for checking it.
TL:DR – Link Detox Boost speeds up the recovery process and working in Disavows faster, but if it’s not enough disavowed, it’s not enough.
However we are working ongoing to improve the tools and we also want to publish more success stories in the future for proofing that it works.
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But ... how does it do this? Are LRT saying that if we have disavowed 500 domains (i.e. no actual links, just domains), that their tool will force Google to crawl every one of those domains, every page, to confirm that the link is gone?
And anyway, if it's a site that won't remove the link, and/or demands payment to do so, why would Google need to crawl it? By disavowing the domain, you're simply asking Google to ignore it.
There's nothing more I'd like than to have a tool which speeds up the recovery process. But I can't see that this will do it, and I need more confidence in the logic of what is being claimed before I allocate resources to it. If I'm missing something, please enlighten me and I'll be happy to use the tool and report its success.
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Harald,
I need to challenge your response here.
You stated:
"Boost works not only for manual actions but also for algorithmic problems, like Penguin."
That's absolutely not possible. Penguin is not baked into the main algorithmic process. it's a separate entity that only runs a couple times a year. So unless the clean-up was done literally within a few days of the next Penguin update, the magic recovery you claim was NOT due to Penguin related problems.
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I used it recently and managed to remove a manual penalty removal with the first attempt by using Link Detox. I can say that 80% of the efforts were put into reviewing "moderate" toxic links and manually removing those who we think are bad for our site.
A software tool can be as good as you tbh. I do not think that submitting a disavow file will lift a penalty in 3 days. Manual removal of links on the other hand can help a lot so they need to make clear that part tbh.
A couple of things I did and I think Google liked:
- 20% manual link removal of rich text anchor texts
- Uploaded backlink files from Majestic SEO, Open site Explorer AND Webmaster tools and connected all accounts to link detox. That way you make sure you do not miss anything.
- Built fresh branded and compound links at the same time
Hope this helps
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The question was about if Link Detox Boost works, not about using Link Detox.
I do think Link Detox is a great program. Just Boost isn't.
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