Disavow Experts: Here's one for ya ....

[HLTalk]

Not sure how to handle this one.   Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ...

Just a quick 3 minute video explanation:  https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E

I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in.

Thanks.

[ChrisAshton]

The horrible thing about link removal is that it's often hard to give an accurate answer to this question. On one hand, directories, link farms etc are often ignored by search engines so having them may be doing you no harm. On the other hand, it's impossible to know if the specific domains you're looking at are actually being ignored or not.

In these scenarios I tend to lean towards having them removed anyway, just in case they are being counted. As you pointed out, there is a chance that removing them will remove some strength from your site and see you drop in rankings but since it's impossible to tell the outcome until it's too late, I'd rather risk being penalised for removing bad links than having them.

There are a few things you can do to make your life marginally easier here:

• Contact the site and ask them nicely to remove the links. They do have a phone number on the contact page, you'd be surprised how powerful a phone conversation can be vs yet another generic email.
• Export the list of referring domains (rather than links) and bulk-categorise in Excel as much as possible. Filter for words like fasthealth, seo, link, directory/directories etc and highlight them all for removal
• Disavow by domain rather than links. All you have to change in the disavow file is adding domain: to the beginning.
  For example: domain:website.com.

If you do decide to give them a call or even email them, the best angle I've found is "I'm cleaning up the links in accordance with Google guidelines and have to be very picky with the ones I keep; this is no reflection on the quality of your site but I'd really appreciate it if you can remove them". Far more likely to get results than the attitude some people take of "hey scumbag, your horrible site is ruining my rankings, get rid of these spam links".

Also, the reason I say to export, evaluate and disavow at a domain level is simply a matter of volume. Rather than 20,000 spam links, you may only end up having to sift through 200 referring domains instead; far easier to manage. In  my experience it's pretty rare that you'd want to disavow just one link from a site like these so doing it at the domain level disavows them all and protects you if they decide to change their URL structure in the future. A new URL structure would give you a link from a "new page" in the eyes of the search engine.

[HLTalk]

Thank you so much.   So that leaves the most important question.  How do I know if these are benefiting me?  I really can't afford to lose rankings right now, as we are in this situation due to already ruined rankings for an unknown reason.  There are about 300 of them total.  We have roughly 2,000 unique domains linking to us.  So its a decent chunk.

Ironically their domain authority is "44" and mine is "45" .... the site has been online 16 years (with nary a design update apparently) ... their Moz domain authority is 37 whereas mine is 38.   So ... I'm not sure if these guys are viewed terribly by Google or not...

There must be some way to ascertain what Google thinks of this site and its links... ?

[ChrisAshton]

No problem at all, happy to help. Unfortunately the best tools that we have to evaluate these are tools like Open Site Explorer which try to emulate how Google looks at links but they're imperfect for the very same reason that I can't possibly give you a definitive answer: Google doesn't want us to know!

Unfortunately, the only way we can ever know the outcome is to implement the change and see if the rankings get better or worse - welcome to the struggles of SEO!

If you really can't afford to be taking a hit right now but it would be more acceptable in a month or two (e.g. right now is your busiest period) I'd be inclined to wait. Otherwise, it's a tough call but I'd still lean toward having them removed. Don't forget that Google has been promising a Penguin (backlinks) update "very soon" all year! If that damn update finally rolls out tomorrow you may find yourself getting slammed by it... or it could roll out next year... or maybe it'll roll out and you'll be fine. Sigh.

We have had success in doing it steadily with one of our larger clients who were in a similar situation and the results were as good as we could have hoped for but YMMV. We essentially did the removal in stages. We divided the bad domains up into batches then contacted the first batch requesting removal then disavowing.

While all this was happening we also got to work building quality links to the site as well so they roughly cancelled each other out. Then we did the same thing with the other batches of bad links until we'd been through the lot.

For us, the end result was a series of fairly marginal peaks and troughs that directly correlated with link removal and link acquisition so the net position at any given time was approximately the same. I must stress though that YMMV here - since I have a total data sample of 2 domains (this client has 2 companies/sites), it's impossible for me to say with absolute certainty that what I saw is the direct result of our process.