Ranking Drops Due to Bad Links or What?

[Yasin__Khan]

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[MetaPaul]

Hi Yasin,

I hope you're well!

You can create a disavow file that contains potentially spammy domains, but I would note John Mueller’s statements from a Google Webmaster hangout in November 2017.

“With regards to sites that don’t have a manual action for link issues, we do try to take those links out of the equation automatically when we can recognize them.” - JM

Do you know if your site was manually penalized by Google? You can confirm this in Google Search Console: google.com/webmasters/tools/ Dashboard > Search Traffic >> Manual Actions.

Furthermore, Mueller goes on to explain:

“If you’re unsure as to whether or not Google is actually taking those into account or kind of taking those out of the equation then the disavow file is a great way to kind of get peace of mind and to say well I’m sure these won’t get taken into account by any of Google’s algorithms. And that way you’re absolutely certain that you’re not associated with those links to your site that you can’t remove or kind of change.” -JM

Marie Haynes, wrote an awesome start to finish guide on how to build and submit your disavow, which can be found here:

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Note: the article is a bit dated, but the basic premise still applies. Hope this helps!

You may also want to make sure everything was redirected properly when you merged sites and switched to https. Are the old domains still being indexed?

All the best,

Paul