Disavow and link analysis

[ShaMenz]

...and neither did my first link removal client, but the penalty was revealed when I insisted that he needed to lodge a reconsideration request.

I have heard this story repeated over and over while talking to rmoov users over the past few months...I am quite sure there are way more people out there who are under a manual penalty than anyone realizes.

I have my own theory as to why this has happened, but that's probably for a blog post some time.

In a nutshell, I absolutely agree with Ryan's take on the subject except for one thing...hard earned experience does not in any way amount to bias.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[freestone]

I suppose we would consider a reconsideration request if once these ugly backlinks are removed or disavowed the traffic does not return.  It is tough to think that something that was done 6 years ago now has such a huge cost.  I still think that if you are going to change such a fundamental rule (or finally actually inforce it might be a better way to put it) that you should allow people to simply reset their link profiles via the Disavow tool..... but hey .....no one is going to give me Matt's job anytime soon.

In the case of this site I watch the traffic fade starting the day of Penguin and it dropped more over the course of something like 5 days......It seems pretty clear Penguin implementation is the cause of the traffic lose also becuase long overdue deep on-page work did not help one bit.

Let the hours and hours of work begin....Ugh

I suppose one good thing about trying to get the links actaully removed is that traffic might start to recover during the effort as opposed to load up the disavow and wait.  In that sense we will start with the most agregious sites first.

The one thing I am still puzzled about is the 2012 backlink that are so harmful.  It is hard not to conclude this site is under attack by competitors.  I know everyone like to say this is rare but hey if you are being attacked then for your the stat is 100% ...not rare......why else would really scummy sites be backlinking to this site.  Please someone tell me a reason other than the 3 I have describe in this thread.

[RyanKent]

Can you share an example of these links which were created in 2012 and you feel are the result of an attack? Are you 100% certain neither the client nor any agent (family member, employee, developer, etc) working on the client's behalf had any part in the creation of these links?

[freestone]

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[RyanKent]

**Here are a few examples that came right from the Google recent export from the webmaster tools and were links identified in Oct. **

There are several possibilities. A page could have been blocked via robots.txt and have since been unblocked. A page could have had the "noindex" tag applied and now it has been removed.

Another possibility is issues with the site architecture. A page could have been buried deep or existing as an island page, but now the navigation is fixed and the link is found.

In order to investigate further, I would need the URL to the actual web page which contains the link to your target site, along with the URL of the site. I need to be able to find the link on the page and use other tools to determine the link's age.

[ShaMenz]

Hi JW,

There are lots of reasons you could be seeing links like this.

I have seen entire websites with hundreds of pages suddenly appear with links to a client's site and even been able to find references to a competitor amongst the hundreds of harmful linking URLs. While this was ringing every "negative SEO" bell for me initially, after careful investigation it became obvious that it was in fact some random person who decided to capitalize on a valuable niche by creating a site using hundreds of spammy articles that had since been deleted from directories by my client and their competitor...

Webmasters have long tried to get exposure for sites by adding links and clicking them or injecting referral data into server logs in the hope that curious site owners will click the referral link to check out the referring site.There are also quite a number of posts out there suggesting that linking out to quality sites can help rankings...as a result there are also people out there with poor sites who are trying to use this to improve their situation.

Most important of all, it is well known that data offered by Google through WMT is notoriously out of date ... I have seen several instances where newly surfaced links have been in place for more than a year.

If there is a mantra to adopt when working on link removals, I would say it is "nothing is ever as it seems".

Hope that helps,

Sha

[freestone]

Thanks to the both of you for your help.  Sorry for the tardy reply as I was in transit.  The client has agreed for us to try and contact these sites and request link removal.  If that does not work then we will put a disavow list together and try to get this link profile repaired.  Then we will work harder on some quality links.

It is still hard to swallow that a practice that was once rewarded now requires money to fix....guess we will just caulk that one up to "Life isn't always fair".

I am just going to take Google Recent, Majestic SEO, and Site Explorer put them all together and get to work.

Ryan if you can share the name of the tool that would might give me a better handle on the actual age of the link that would be great.  I don't really want to share the links publicly and have my client to get 100 of calls.  If you are really curious I can PM details to you.

[RyanKent]

Hi JW,

I do not personally use any tools to measure a link's age. Google has a new export available in WMT which shows this information as well as several other tools. I have never encountered a situation where a link's age has been relevant to link removal.

With the above noted, a link tool can only tell you the first time the tool discovered the link. Links can be much older than the discovery date for a variety of reasons.

For your backlink report, I highly advise including Bing and AHREFs as well. Otherwise, you will be missing numerous links.

With respect to identifying links, it is my experience most SEO professionals are not aligned with Google when it comes to evaluating a manipulative vs organic link. A few quick tips:

• The PR / PA / DA of a web page should not be a consideration when making a determination of organic vs manipulative

• The anchor text is also not a factor. Here you may say "wait a minute! Penguin specifically detects anchor text". What I mean is...if you change the anchor text on a link to simply a URL, the link itself is no less manipulative.

• 99%+ of general directories are manipulative in my experience. Most niche directories are manipulative as well in my experience.

• Most press releases are manipulative as well

There are tons of other examples and you need to refer to Google's Guidelines and ask yourself "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?

Best wishes

[freestone]

My plan was to use your last statement as my approach.  "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?  Said perfectly.  Does it mean I will remove some good links....well maybe but if google is not indexing a site then I suspect it is not giving me juice anyway and there are tons of links that google is not indexing.  This site does have some nice links so hopefully cleaning this up will get the site out the the box where penguins are stored.

I used netpeak for these status....great tool but worried me a tad as Malwarebytes blocks some outgoing traffic that tool is trying to send to their web site.  I assume just stat info and not the content of my hard drive....LOL

Thanks for the bing and AHREFs thoughts.  I will go grab them also, netpeak them and pull them in to the ACCESS database where I am making a superset list of junk.  Unformtualy the list is something on the order of 1000 links.  Give are take a few.

[freestone]

So when I finally get around to disavowing some of these links should I include domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site.  That is to say the links are no longer active.  The reason I ask is there are many like that which are sites which were obvious link farms.....so it google holding those against the site even though those site are no longer active...... I could create a section in the disavow..and comment label it something like

OLD links that show up using various tools but no longer seem to function but we are including in order to make sure the link profile of this site is clean.

????

[RyanKent]

should I [disavow] domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site

No. The purpose of the disavow tool is to separate your site from active links which you are unable to remove.

[freestone]

Cool....I will stick to the ones we found that are not natrual if we dont get a reponce to remove.... I am still going to be amazed if any of these sites repond but out of 52k links I almost have the list of domains to contact.  Stuck the exports into a Microsfot Access DB which makes them easier to click and categories.

Cheers

[freestone]

Ryan what do you think about directories like this

http://www.getbacklinked.com/

I don't think they pass the smell test but some do have thousands of pages index at google and even have PR from 1 to 4 on a few of them.

These are kind of like dmoz (a good idea turned joke IMHO).

My inclination is to request an unlink because I personally think that any site that just lists sites should be nuked from the internet.

I have been making as bad any site that has a submit your link or other such button in the top menu bar.

jw

[freestone]

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[RyanKent]

JW, your instincts seem solid. I do not understand how you relate a site's PR or number of indexed pages to whether or not it provides manipulative links. The two points are not relevant.

I find both the getbacklinked.com and lookdirectory.com sites do not comply with Google's standards for legitimate directories. Any links from those directories will be viewed as manipulative by Google.

Bing and Google vary in their philosophy. Bing is much more selective about which pages it chooses to add to it's index. When a site violates Bing's guidelines, they often choose to de-index the site.

Google indexes a tremendous amount of low quality pages. Just because the page is indexed does not mean it would ever be found by a reasonable keyword search. Regarding PR, it is simply one of over 200 metrics used to determine rankings. Google has stated in the clearest possible terms SEOs and site owners should greatly reduce their focus on PR. They even reduced PR updates to just a few times a year, but people seem to not get the message.

In summary, you clearly understand the directories offer manipulative links. Accordingly, you need to remove those links in order to resolve your penalty / Penguin issue.

[freestone]

I thoughs so ...just checking.  I get that the PR is only updated periodically.  I just frankly find is super hypocrytical to even index these sites.  In fact I will go further and say that if Google should either.

1. Just ignore links from sites like these as part a sites link profile.

2. publish a list like a wanted board an allow you to simple disavow.

I know once again I think they should think like me and I know this will not going to happen....so off I go to play the game some more.  Expect it to become harder and harder for small or even medium sized business to play this game.  In a few short years page one will belong to the large companies.

I am determined to fix the link profile of this site.  I found 52k backlinks..... Needless to say lots of them are old and the site no longer exists but at least once done I will have a cleaned up link profile.  A new starting point.

Thanks again Ryan

Signed backlink sloger jw