Ranking Drop and Google Disavow Requests

[GratefulFred]

My website, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has fallen dramatically for the top industry search terms (nile cruise, nile cruises) over the last 12 months from previous page one rankings to page three which has very badly affected us financially.

I found, using Linkdetox, that we had thousands of back-links for non-related anchor-text, mainly porn terms, viagra, etc.

I have submitted a Disavow file and request about a week ago and wondered firstly if the enormous amount of these links would have helped cause the drop to page three and secondly  if the Disavow request will eventually help the website return to better rankings?

Thanks,Colin

[danwebman]

Usually this is where someone has paid for back links and yes they can destroy your site rather than make it better.Try to build up site links manually.

Use the command links:www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk to dig them all out of Google. This may then be a manual task of getting them removed from the sites.

Good Luck

[GratefulFred]

Thanks Dave,

Looks a big task and I wonder if these spammy webmasters will take any notice. Hope that the Disavow request will help.

Cheers

[GregB123]

Hi Colin,

For sure Disavow the bad domains that are linking to you (whole domains, not just pages). If you are comfortable working with your htaccess file you can follow the guidelines in this article to get those bad domains to automatically prune links to your site (assuming they are automated sites) by 404'ing incoming visits from those bad domains. This tricks the site's bots into assuming your site is gone and so they delete the links to your site. Works for some spa,,y sites, but not all.   http://www.boxaid.com/word/simple-alternative-google-disavow-tool/

The sad truth though is that for awhile the bad links were probably boosting your ranking, and there removal (by Disavow, by Google's algorythm, and maybe by 404ing domains) will cause your rank to fall. You will have to build good links to replace the seething mass of bad ones...

[GratefulFred]

Thanks Gregory,

I'll try the htaccess route too.

I've read that the bad links could be boosting rankings. It seems that the drop in ranking from page one to three may not have been a result of just the bad links.

Colin

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Colin

You might also want to check your on-page seo and the technical seo side.

So aside from links, those might have also contributed to the drop.

[GratefulFred]

Hi Dennies and thanks,

I'd done a lot of on-page SEO to try and ensure that was as good as I could get at the time but you may well be right as it has certainly been a big drop.

The puzzling things about the drop is that the site has been in existence for a long time, it's a "genuine' site about Nile cruises with tons of relevant and useful content that ranked really well for so long...and then...bingo...massive drop.

Yet competitors who I out-ranked and who's sites are still the same remain on page one.

Very frustrating.

Colin