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Why do you want to remove the file?  Are you concerned that you may have disavowed links that you shouldn't have? When you remove the file, then as Google recrawls each of the sites that were listed in your file, they will re-avow them which means that they will once again start to give you the link equity that comes from that link.  If it's a good link then you'll regain some good link equity.  (But then this begs the question of why you would disavow it to start with.)  If it's an unnatural link then at first what will likely happen is nothing as Google will not give you any benefit for this type of link.  But, if you've got enough unnatural links then the next time that Google runs the Penguin algorithm your site will look less trustworthy when it comes to links and you could see a drop in rankings. It's complicated though.  If you are already under the effects of Penguin and you filed a disavow and then you removed your disavow then really nothing would happen. I wouldn't recommend removing your disavow file unless you feel that you have accidentally disavowed links that are good ones.  If you're not sure if you've done that then you should consider having someone review your links for you and give you an idea of which ones should be disavowed.

Super, Gordon! So glad my reply was helpful and happy reading!

I'm glad if it's helpful! Happy reading!

It really depends on what you define as blackhat. On-page trickery (cloaking, redirects for search engines bots, etc.) can be discovered by browsing as a search bot, digging into code, viewing caches, etc. Danny Sullivan and Rand uncovered a large amount of cloaked (and stolen) content on stage at SMX Sydney a few years ago. It was quite entertaining at the time Some people are basic enough to use tactics like hidden, white-on-white text, as Martijn says. I'm yet to see that tactic actually working post-2004 though If it's links they're using, the easiest way is to use a tool like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or similar to check the links out. Sneaky people can block the OSE / Ahrefs / MajesticSEO bots from crawling the sources of their backhat links if they have access to the linking sites. You can block the bots either in robots.txt or by rejecting the visits to stop the bots from noting that the links exist. That way, the backlink analysis tools will never see that blackhatsite.com links to rankingsite.com, and so forth. It takes a big network that the spammer controls to block link research tools' bots' access to every link you build, however, so this isn't too common. Whether all big brands / well ranked sites are using blackhat tactics pretty much depends on your definition of blackhat, but it's certainly true that it is very hard if not impossible to rank top 3 for competitive terms (car insurance, poker, credit cards) without parting with money that results in links being built. This doesn't mean that they're all buying links, but they're definitely investing in marketing that results in links, and the whitest of the whitehats will say that this is technically not organic, natural link development. It is, however, what we do - marketing.

The idea of the "sandbox" is an old-fashioned way of looking at a site that doesn't have enough authority to rank well yet. In the past, Google employed different ways of making sure brand new sites were worth ranking before they ranked them, but those methods have changed and the term doesn't apply anymore. Is it possible that the site simply has too few backlinks to be competitive yet? It's often easier to rank well in Bing than it is in Google (although it's surprising you mention that it is not ranking in Yahoo as Bing powers Yahoo's search engine now).

"unless the old subdomain was something like reviews.newdomain.com and now you moving them to newdomain.com/reviews." That is the case. Was "Store.domain.com" and now is "domain.com". Was previously two sites and the one I am dumping was the subdomain. Thanks for hanging in there and answering this thing!

Assuming that those are the only unnatural links the site had, there's a good chance that when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm again the site will once again look clean in the eyes of Penguin and be able to rank again. However, if Penguin refreshes soon, there is a chance that not much will change as Google needs time to revisit each of the offending linking domains and recognize that they are no longer linking to you (even if it is through a 301).  This is why some sites need to sit through two refreshes before they see a recovery. Keep in mind as well that the site has to have good links in order to see a recovery.  If the previous rankings were only supported by the equity that came through the 301 (prior to getting affected by Penguin) then you might not see much improvement once Penguin refreshes. Gary mentioned that the next Penguin refresh is probably going to be in the next two weeks.  I don't know that anyone knows that for sure...I'm thinking that this is a guess as it has already been seven months since the last refresh and historically the longest Google has gone between refreshes is 6 months.  I agree that it makes sense for Google to do it soon, but it still could be several months if that's what they decide to do.

As Marie and Gary have said, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why a site would acquire a high number of new inbound links naturally. Even if those sorts of links prompted Google to manually have a look at the backlink profile, this sort of activity isn't going to hurt. What Google is looking for with backlink acquisition is unnatural patterns, so if you were to add 1,000 links to a backlink profile of (say) 1,500 links, with no discernible media attention, content creation or seasonality, you'd be breaking a pattern of link acquisition (or the lack thereof) and possibly trigger attention. Google is incredibly good at pattern recognition, for obvious reasons. If a pattern changes, there has to be a reason for the change. If they determine that the change was manipulative an unnatural, that's where you run into trouble. Echoing what others have said about link building using directories - I can't endorse that as a link building tactic at all. Get listed where appropriate for reasons other than SEO (are you a local hairdresser in Everett, WA? Getting listed on a site about service providers in Everett is absolutely fine). The sort of directory-based link building that was common and fairly useful for "volume" in ~2009 is no longer a good idea. You'll show up on sites like these without effort (people seeking to fill out directories they run), and shouldn't worry too much about those sorts of links, but it's not advisable to seek them yourself.

Thank you. That is a great answer!

Thanks guys! Upon further research what's happening is "Entity Escaping", where symbols have to use a code...ie & = &, so it's all good. http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Hi Jesse, I think they are fine, the reason why is as follows: They are in the same related niche (I'm going off your examples) and they have been there for a while and if they've not hurt him yet and there are not thousands of them you may just cause more harm removing them and then have to explain why he has dropped in rankings. What you could look into if it bothers you is remove them but attempt to replace the link value so there is no drop. However as i said earlier they are in the same niche and seems to be okay, you can always work on other links/areas so it diluted the above links in their profile It's great to be proactive but don't be too scared of the Google and as long as the following is true you will be fine: Make your site (and links) for the user A user may go to - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com and then want to buy some hunting equipment and so the link is in fact normal and fine. Hope it helps. Good luck!

If you don't use hreflang="x-default" there can be some potential search issues: 1. Searchers of a particular language/region aren't shown a URL tailored to them when one exists. Google might show: www.example.com/en-us/product-item (in Google UK - searcher was searching for example product item) 2. Search results might disply two similar URLs from yoru site, confusin users 3. Search engine might not be aware of all language variations However, if the main index page (www.example.com) doesn't exist and has been 301 redirected to en-us then you can keep en-us as your default page and use . Or, if you've have a URL that doesn't consistently serves content in one language - perhaps it redirects to different language pages based on the user's IP, or it dynamically serves different language content on the same page, or it's a page which only asks the user to select their preferred home page then your hreflang value can be x-default. x-default signals to search engines that the URL's language is broad, rather then specific Hreflang doesn't harm in any which way even if you're using proper redirects

Hi Freshfireone, I would recommend that you identify the client's business model on this post and then look at the suggestions for how that business model can best proceed: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide If you have more questions after you take a gander at that, please ask away!

Thanks for your response Oleg. But if I separate matching URLs into different sitemaps, then doesn't that go against what Google recommends by including them in 1 multilingual sitemap?

yerp, the hack is cloaking the links and only showing them to bots. In the future, you would want to do a "Fetch as Google" from within webmaster tools to see what Google sees.

Hi Matt, In general, my advice would be to achieve permanent 301 redirects at as granular a page/folder level as possible (prioritized by the current number of linking root domains - Open Site Explorer's Top Pages report is a great tool for this). Where the rebranding & migration is concerned, I would strongly recommend reading through two resources here at Moz:   Ruth Burr's overview of Moz's own fairly recent move (from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com) and Aleyda Solis's handy "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration" infographic Between both, I think you'll have your bases covered. Best, Mike

ha Spencer, what a muppet i was being, helps if i had used " after rel= it's easy to spot when you spell it right! lesson learned again....

done

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