To disavow or not to disavow

[mgane]

This post is deleted!

[mgane]

"quick questions", he says. Didn't realise that message was so long until I posted!

TL;DR version:

Are there any potential negative repercussions to disavowing (beyond the possibility of potentially disavowing a valuable link without realising)?

Should I be worried about (what I think are) content scraping sites - sites hosting pdfs from our site, duplicate directory entries (cybo, DMOZ duplicates etc)?

[BruceA]

First of all, Matt Cutts Head of Spam Team Google, is very clear about great content on Google search, therefore if you do a couple of searches for Matt Cutts Disavow, you will see that in essence, if in doubt disavow.

But you are right to be cautious and also that some links can have a valid relationship with your site, so do be thorough with your research before disavowing.  Also double check via Google Analytics to see if you can find out a bit more about the link.  Some linking in domains can appear a bit odd, but can be something as simple as a Cable TVs internet shopping channel.

Bruce

[Chris661]

I can tell you my own experience after being hit by Penguin. I went through the same agony of wondering if filing a disavow would make Google notice me and penalize me. The fact was they already had noticed me and penalized me for spammy anchor text links. And if you have spammy links and have seen rankings and traffic drop, they know about you too (or will). From what I have read many SEOs proactively disavow bad links and periodically review backlink profiles to stay "clean" and update their disavow files. The big mistake appears to not disavow thoroughly enough. I believe the expression was "use a machete not a scalpel".

While some believe Google is aware of scrapers like cybo and will not penalize for them, it doesn't hurt. I don't take the chance. And it took 6-8 months but my site did recover. Of course you need to build more good links as well. (I need to do that part!).

So I think the answer is to go for it. Especially since you qualified the question and are aware some of those links could be helping your site. But instead of wondering build new good links and move forward. My 2 cents.

Best of luck!

[seovp]

Hi,

There won't be negative repercussions to disavowing, especially if you have been previously hit by a penalty then it is something you should definitely do.

As Chris said, you should take the machete approach and if in doubt, disavow. But having said that, do make sure you do some research on the links. In terms of cybo and dmoz scrapping links, I would recommend that you disavow just in case. It has been said that these 'shouldn't' negatively affect your site, but it's always better to be 100% sure.

Kind Regards

[mgane]

Thanks all for the responses. Particularly interesting to hear about your experiences Chris, and glad to hear that you recovered!

I'm just finalising my disavow list now. I've gone with your advice, and very much taken a machete approach, getting rid of all of the scraping sites, as well the spam links created by our SEO. I pulled up another backlink report yesterday, and found a load more dodgy links that weren't showing up in moz, ahrefs or webmaster - maddening! But I'm almost done going through them.

One last quick question. Can I completely ignore nofollow links? I understand that disavowing a link essentially makes it a nofollow link, but I also understand that having lots of nofollow links with manipulated anchor text can contribute to a poor overall anchor text profile and hurt your site in this way. If not disavowing, should I be trying to get spammy nofollow links removed, or can I safely ignore these altogether?

[Chris661]

Take a look at this recent thread.

http://moz.com/community/q/should-my-website-needs-to-be-disavowed-or-not

Marie and Sha are very knowledgeable in this area. And both have websites you should check out for help and great tools.

[mgane]

Many thanks, Chris.

[MarieHaynes]

I'll put in my two cents here.  I commonly get asked whether there is a possible negative to filing a disavow.  As you pointed out, one possible negative is if you disavow links that are actually good links.  But, in my opinion, you don't need to worry that filing a disavow is going to put a target on your site for the webspam team to do a manual review.  If you were hit by Penguin then, unless all those bad links are links that you can physically remove yourself (which is unlikely) then from my experience recovery is not possible without the disavow tool.

Those sites that you mentioned as examples are all ones that I would probably ignore.  The point is to disavow links that you personally made (or an SEO on your behalf made) for SEO purposes.  Google does a pretty good job for the most part in ignoring the scraper sites and sites that link out to everyone.  With that being said, if you're not sure, then disavow.  Those links are not doing any good for you and if you disavow them no harm will be done.

I don't spend a lot of time working with nofollows.  However, if I happen to come across an obviously bad link that is nofollowed I'll disavow it just in case for some reason the site owner changes their links to followed.  That's pretty rare though.  There are some cases where Google can manually penalize a site for horrendous comment spam even if nofollowed but this is really rare.  So, in general I ignore nofollows on my disavow.

If your parents' site was hit by Penguin then three things have to happen in order for you to see some recovery:

1. You have to do a really thorough disavow

2. You have to wait for a Penguin refresh.  At this point it has been 11 months since the last one but Google is working on making them happen faster.  Also, you need to hope that Penguin doesn't refresh until at least a few weeks after your disavow is filed as it takes time for Google to crawl those disavowed links.  In some cases it can take a few months, but my tests show that most links are disavowed within a few weeks.

3. You have to have a good site that actually has good links there along with the unnatural ones.  Otherwise, when you remove the bad links there won't be anything left to prop the site up.

Good luck!

[Chris661]

As always definitive and worth a lot more than two cents!

[mgane]

Thanks, Marie. That's a big help.

It's your third point that I'm most worried about. Not all of our backlink profile consists of spam. We have some really good links - from the BBC, various other UK media like the Guardian, the Independent, even from wikipedia - but these links are mostly years old, and there isn't that much beneath them. We have a handful of good links at the top, and then a whole mass of spam, with very little inbetween. By the time I finish disavowing, there will probably only be about 30 or so legitimate domains pointing to ours.

Google used to rank our website well,  even before we employed an SEO. We've kept some of these rankings, particularly in image search*, so I've some hope that we'll make a recovery from penguin in other areas, but I also know that penguin hits can be permanent.

*This is, or rather was, our one bright spot, even after penguin hit us. You used to be able to type in just about any region or game park in Africa - our main business - and our images would come up first in the results. We lost these rankings not with penguin but when we changed our website dimensions a year or two ago and had to upload new images to replace the old. Those that we didn't change still rank well - type in Serengeti, for instance, and we're still right at the top. I've never been able to understand why we do so well in image search and so poorly in the main search results.

Not sure if there's a question anywhere in there. I think I'm just waffling now. Thanks again for the advice.