Update: Check out the new findings at the end of the post.
To many webmasters, Google’s Disavow Tool seems a lifesaver. If you’ve suffered a Google penalty or been plagued by shady link building, simply upload a file of backlinks you want to disavow, and BOOM - you’re back in good graces. Traffic city!
Or nothing happens at all.
Few Google products have produced more fear, rumors and speculation. No one outside Google knows exactly how it works, and fewer understand how to succeed with it. To better understand, I used the tool myself to disavow 1000s of links, and talked with dozens of SEOs who used it in attempts to recover from Google penalties.
How Dangerous Is Disavow?
When you first log into the Disavow Tool, Google does everything in its power to dissuade you from actually using it with scary messaging.
What’s the worst that could happen?
To find out how much damage I could do, I performed an experiment: Disavowing every link pointing to my website. Over 35,000 of them.
In this case, no reconsideration request was filed. Would the disavow tool work on its own?
Disavow 35,000 Links to a Single Website
Process:
- Download all links from Google Webmaster Tools
- Upload 35,000 properly formatted links to Google's Disavow Tool
- Wait 2 Months
Results:
After 2 months, nothing happened. No drop in traffic.
The evidence suggests one of three possibilities:
- You must file a reconsideration request after disavowing your links, or...
- The disavow has built-in safeguards in order to protect you from disavowing good links, or...
- It takes longer than 2 months for Google to process all the links.
We’ve heard conflicting accounts from Googlers whether the tool works automatically, or if must file a reconsideration request for it to work. The data implies the later, although some SEOs say they’ve seen results from using the Disavow without filing a reconsideration request.
Google also states they reserve the right to ignore your disavowed links if they think you made a mistake, much like rel=”canonical”.
Best Advice: Safeguards or not, you might still shoot yourself in the foot. Be careful disavowing links!
Can You Use Disavow for Penguin?
Can you use the Disavow Tool if you haven't received a manually penalized? For example, will it work for Penguin?
The answer: maybe.
Here's a reminder: Google updates like Panda and Penguin are part of Google's overall algorithm. They automatically affect your rankings without direct human intervention. On the other hand, a manual penalty is often applied when you violate Google's guidelines. These can be both applied and lifted manually by Google's Webspam team.
Google representatives, including Matt Cutts, have gone on record to say the Disavow Tool could be used to help if you’ve been hit by Penguin (an algorithmic action), but also suggests that this applies to links that also violate Google’s Quality Guidelines.
Penguin and Google’s Unnatural Link Warnings often go hand in hand. So if you were hit by one, you are often hit by the other. Conversely, certain SEOs have claimed benefits from using the disavow on sites that were not penalized.
Best Advice: If you’ve been hit with a manual penalty, you need to file a reconsideration request if using the Disavow Tool. If you haven't been manually penalized, the benefits of using the tool are inconclusive.
1. Remove First, Disavow Last
Google wants you to remove links first. Disavow is a last resort.
100% accuracy isn’t required, but effort counts.
Google’s Webspam team keeps a historical index of your backlink profile, so that when you file a reconsideration request they can see the links you’ve worked to remove.
2. Gather Your Links
You can use any source you want, but Google recommends downloading your Latest Links report directly from Webmaster Tools.
3. Find the Bad Links
You can do this two ways, with either automatic tools or manual analysis. Realistically, you should use both. Best Manual Analysis Resource:
Best Link Removal Research Tools:
- Link Detox
- Remove’em
- SEOgadgets Link API Extension for Excel. They also have contact information on file for millions of URLs.
4. Outreach, Outreach, Outreach
Next, you’re going to send emails to get those links removed. Lots of emails.
Resources for Link Removal Outreach:
4. Trust in Google Docs
When you document your efforts, don’t submit random links to the Webspam team; they may not click on them. By sharing all your evidence via Google Docs, you provide a level of protection that helps ensure the Webspam team sees your evidence.
5. When in Doubt, Disavow Entire Domains
Google’s Disavow Tool gives you 2 options when disavowing links: individual URLs or entire domains.
Many webmasters fail at their reconsideration requests the first time because they miss too many links. The fear is that you’ll disavow something valuable, but if you’ve been rejected time and time again, this one change often leads to success.
Here’s a screenshot from Dr. Pete’s post showing both formats.
Best Advice: If you are rejected after disavowing individual URLs, try disavowing entire domains.
6. Formatting Counts
Google rejects many disavow files because of bad formatting, but webmasters usually never know. Guidelines state the file type should be .txt only and “must be encoded UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.”
7. Bonus: Extra "Removed" Links with Screaming Frog
Google’s link index of your site is rarely up to date. They undoubtedly include links that no longer exist. To find dead links quickly, download a complete file of your latest links from Google Webmaster Tools into Screaming Frog (use List Mode) or another crawler of your choice.
When finished, take any links that return a 404 and download these into a spreadsheet. Be sure to include these dead links as "Removed" when you submit your reconsideration request to Google, otherwise they may not know about them.
Conclusion
The Disavow Tool is useful, but damn tricky.
Someday, perhaps Google can get away from tools like the Disavow. Today, good SEOs can't keep up with what's considered a good link or a bad, and Google continually cracks down on what it considers a “bad link.”
For successful marketers, it’s much more fulfilling to build new links, than disavow old ones.
I suppose that's Google's point, no?
Additional Resources:
- Does the Disavow Tool Work?
- Google's Disavow Tool - Take a Deep Breath
- Penalty Lifted: How to Use Google's Disavow Tool Case Study
Update 5/31: Closer to an Answer
As it turns out, my ranking started dropping the same day Penguin 2.0 was released , the Thursday before this post. (I actually researched the post before this, and the traffic drop happened around a holiday weekend, so it went largely unnoticed)
As of today my rankings and traffic are definitely down:
Tim Grice of Branded3 was sharp enough to notice something similar. Tim has experience with the Disavow Tool himself and saw something similar last Thursday. His theory is that Google processes your Disavow file either:
- When you file for reconsideration, or
- When there’s a big data refresh, such a Penguin update.
Does this mean my site was hit by Penguin? No. It simply indicates Google processed my disavowed links with the Penguin refresh. Those disavowed sites no longer count towards my domain, so my rankings dropped - at least in theory.
Also today, Marie Haynes published a collection of mini-case studies showing dramatic movement in SERP visibility during the Penguin refresh on sites that disavowed links.
We’ve also heard anecdotal accounts of other sites seeing much faster results from the Disavow without filing a reconsideration request, but even these webmasters saw a much bigger change happen during Penguin 2.0.
If this all proves to be true, the following is possible:
- Google’s Disavow Tool may work automatically, but doesn’t process until you file for reconsideration or there is a major data refresh.
- You could, in theory, use the Disavow Tool to recover from Penguin, even if no manual penalty was applied and you don’t file a reconsideration request.
What we don’t know at all is how often Google makes data refreshes that would incorporate disavowed links. My own site waited 2 months for a change to take place, and last year saw only 3-4 Penguin refreshes.
On the other hand, we’ve also heard anecdotal accounts of other sites seeing much faster results from the Disavow without filing a reconsideration request, but even these webmasters saw a much bigger change happen during Penguin 2.0.
A better question might be: Should you use the Disavow Tool to try to recover from Penguin if you haven’t received a manual penalty?
My answer: Recovery stories have been few and far between, but they do happen. In my personal experience, it seems more likely to recover from Penguin if you earn new and more diverse links from high quality sites. This, along with obvious link cleanup, seems to be the best course of action every time.
By the way, I’ve removed the file from the Disavow Tool. Let’s see what happens.
Fingers crossed.
Is it just me or is the comment box on SEOMoz horrible? It always removes my paragraphs and adds line breaks and I have to edit it every time to make it readable.
I'll take the six thumbs as a yes then. :) SEOMoz - fix the commenting box, it really kind of sucks and seriously impacts the readability of many of the fine comments left here.
We actually have an update to the commenting system coming soon that should be of help to you.
It's coming real soon!
"real soon" as in when the new moz arrives tomorrow? ;)
Matt: so you knew you dirty devil ? :)
Ohhh yes. Although I had minimal info to go on :P
https://mattjanaway.co.uk/what-is-happening-at-seomoz/
Moz comments are much nicer! :)
agreed Gloyns
This is another area where Google, who claim to be pushing for more transparency, are giving webmasters very little feedback. Even a processed or denied message in Webmaster Tools would be something but just deathly silence is useless and only wastes everyone's time.
I have had success with manual penalties post a disavow (and an extensive cleanup) but again, less concrete feedback on penguin affected sites so it is hard to know what exactly is going on there. There were a lot of folks waiting for the Penguin update / data refresh and hoping to bounce back but in most cases, nothing really happened.
With some recent clients affected by years and years of historical crap we are skipping a clean up & disavow and going straight to a new domain and having great results with that compared to cleaning up. It is kind of crazy out there now and especially for small, local businesses, just starting again and doing some smart (and simple) local SEO they are seeing better results than they ever had and are not messing around for 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 months trying to clean up a mess their previous SEO left behind.
We still need more transparency from Google
- can people use this tool to start again?- should we just disavow everything in Webmaster tools? Maybe cherry pick the several good links amongst the junk?
One caveat to the above is that despite the problems, most folks still want to hold onto old links and for clients we have supplied a disavow file to they are queering links that are utter garbage yet we get responses like 'what is a matter with that one? We want to rank for that term'.
If you are going to disavow, you have to be brutal and often, if they have done this kind of SEO for years and little else then that does not leave a lot and the clients perception of recovery is highly unlikely as the old tricks just don't work any longer and you can't just remove the crap and sail high again on little or nothing.
Rather than the disavow I would like to see a start again button. A one time gig for a domain so you can just zero it down and start clean. Maybe not that practical but I speak with lots of small business owners that are crippled by this and have learned their lesson. Now, unless we get a clear 'disavow' or 'start again' mandate from Google then folks are still going to be whirling around in another 12 months time wondering what they can do to get their rankings back.
At least people are learning to polish their businesses and marketing in other areas and not just rely on Google organic as the sole source of their traffic / leads / income which is never a bad thing.
In many cases, the SEO winners of yesterday are the losers of today and maybe that is just deserves?
I really love the idea of a "start over" button Marcus. I have worked with so many webmasters who were truly screwed over because they hired someone to do SEO for them. Many will advise them to just start over with a new domain but if your domain is a brand and you have heavily invested in offline marketing of your url then this is just not an option.
I know, it seems almost too simple. It is a big, scary, red button type of affair that resets everything but I guess there is some reason why this can't be done (or they don't want to do it).
I work with some folks who are tied to their domain and are in a sorry state so it would certainly be helpful.
Maybe this is what the disavow is but again, more clear documentation and instructions would be useful as would some user feedback.
Great post Cyrus! Absolutely its very important to try manually removing the spam, unwanted or less useful free for all backlinks to the site first before trying to use the Google Links Disavow tool. Google is intelligent and can make out whether an effort has been made to remove them manually or not, if not it can lead to rejections of disavow link requests and reconsideration requests. To identify the right links to be removed or to find out the exact sites where all the links coming from it should be removed or disavowed is further more important.
I just had a crazy thought. Cyrus, is it at all conceivably possible that disavowing all of your links had no effect on your ranking because perhaps Google is no longer using links as the main metric for rankings anymore? I know, I know...don't thumb me down too much guys. It's pretty unlikely.
But...I've been looking at the organic rankings for queries like "real estate agent in [city]" and "lawyer in [city]" and it seems like most of the top sites have very few links at all. I almost wonder if having a link that smells of SEO is a negative ranking factor.
Something to think about.
Tin Foil Hat Time!
Normally I would agree that this sounds like conspiraloon territory, but I have also seen some new-ish sites in particularly competitive niches doing quite well with almost no links. Some of them don't even have much going for them content-wise.They could be doing some domain redirects, I suppose, but most that I have looked at don't seem to be doing anything like that.
Been wondering if those sites won some sort of Google lottery where totally clean sites get high positions for no particular reason.
Going to put my neck out here - locally for SEO terms my new site is out ranking sites that I know have hundreds of links, some of good quality - guess what - I have no links!!!!
Right there with you.
Main focus of my new blog has solely been on creating awesome content, and am ranking for some real nice competitive terms with absolutely zero backlinking, and within the SEO niche of all places.
Fishy fishy...
Awesome experiment, a possible theory of what Google is up to:
Google is primarily using disavow to improve the algo by collecting aggregate data about "bad" linkers rather than individual "linkees". This is what they really care about. So, the value to Google of providing the disavow function is developing new info for the algorithm. Their main interest is in reducing the value of links from the sites you've disavowed, for everyone.
Theoretically then: when you disavow you vote down a site for purposes of the algorithm rather than directly affecting Google's view of your own site. It's just a vote, not an absolute, others have to participate in the voting as well for Google to act on the information.
Would this explain why your site is still OK? If you vote down an inbound domain, but no one else does because your links are all good, it has zero effect? They just look at your votes and no one else is agreeing so your votes are ignored, no effect, the links remain part of their assessment of your site's value (along with everyone else's that have similar inbounds) despite your input on all those other sites since no one else is voting them down as well?
Just a random thought - cheers.
This is another theory I had not considered but certainly a good one!
Probably much better than my thought that the tool really does nothing at all - except gather information about other websites that might be bad.
Bravo Mr. Shepard. It takes some cojones to disavow every link to your web site in the name of science!
Thumbs up for using the word cojones :)
Some great points Cyrus. Glad to see someone give a shout out to the 'Link Detox' tool. Without that tool, Penguin recovery would be a huge pain.
Cyrus, go glad to see this get published! There is so much misinformation that its great to see this kind of test done and shared too! In my gut I feel Google has to "save us from ourselves" so to speak with some kind of safeguards, and while we all know how this stuff works, I betcha a lot of mid/small businesses have no idea and could really tank their sites, if there was not some kind of failsafe / checkpoint, which would cause them not to rank and would lessen the user experience (potentially).
Will, your post the Yin and Yang of Disavow really made me stop and think. I hope this isn't the future of SEO. Building stuff for SEO is so much more fun than tearing stuff down.
So, in a nutshell, we still don't know for sure what happens if we use this tool...
Wow! You disavowed ALL of your links and saw no decrease in ranking. That's incredible. I am really hoping that the reason for this is that Google has a good failsafe system to prevent webmasters from doing damage to their sites. But, I also have a fear that perhaps the disavow tool is buggy.
It would be really silly to only allow the disavow to work if you have filed for reconsideration. Google is really clear that you shouldn't file for reconsideration if you don't have a manual penalty. In the documentation for the disavow tool it says this: "Q: Should I create a links file as a preventative measure even if I haven’t gotten a notification about unnatural links to my site?A: If your site was affected by the Penguin algorithm update and you believe it might be because you built spammy or low-quality links to your site, you may want to look at your site's backlinks and disavow links that are the result of link schemes that violate Google's guidelines."
To me it sounds like Google is saying that you should be able to use the disavow tool WITHOUT filing for reconsideration.
I thought I would share this. It's only one case but it may help. The owner of a site that was severely affected by Penguin 1.0 allowed me to experiment on his site. We disavowed every link that used keywords as anchor text. He did have links from poor quality sites and also widgets with anchor text as links. We did the disavow months ago and nothing happened. But here are his impressions in WMT. Note, May 22 is when Penguin 2.0 updated:
Penguin recovery?
It is quite obvious that the site began some type of a recovery when Penguin 2.0 hit. Was it a result of the disavow? No new links were built.
Thanks for sharing this Cyrus.
Marie
Exactly Marie!
1. If you've been hit by Penguin, and disavow, must you also file a reconsideration request?
2. Does this only apply when you've received a manual penalty? If you disavow links without a manual penalty, does anything happen?
Hopefully we can get a little more clarity from Google on this.
Hi Cyrus,
First I have to say that every new post just confirms for me that having you back at SEOmoz means everything's right with the world again :)
Now, a few things to add to the discussion...
1. If you've been hit by Penguin, and disavow, must you also file a reconsideration request?
A. The answer is absolutely not. All indications are that for those affected by Penguin, the disavow tool is the only realistic workaround for not being able to actually remove links.
As for lodging a reconsideration request when there is no manual action in place, Google has indicated that every reconsideration request submitted is matched against its database of manual spam actions. If there is no manual action then the system auto-generates a response to indicate that domain is not the subject of a manual spam action. This means that no human actually looks at the reconsideration request.
There is however a good reason that some site owners may be best advised to go ahead and lodge a reconsideration request anyway. The reason is that this is the only sure way to know whether a manual action is in play. With significant evidence of gaps in Google's messaging for those who are under a manual penalty, just accepting that you should clean up and wait for another Penguin update leaves many in a very bad place when they have a real opportunity to deal with it much more quickly.
On this also, it worries me that by talking (as we should) about the clear difference between a "Penguin effect" and a "manual penalty", we inadvertently create the impression that the two are totally unrelated. We need to be careful to say they are two different things, but I absolutely believe that in many cases they are inextricably linked.
I submit:
1) Everything I see tells me that Penguin has flagged sites for manual review with every iteration and the obvious outcome is that those manual reviews have resulted in the application of a manual spam action.
2) John Mueller has acknowledged that Google does use the data from the algorithm to flag sites for manual review.
3) It seems quite far fetched to believe that the number of manual penalties now in play could possibly have been only the result of individuals having lodged a spam report against another site owner. Seriously? Are there people out there who do nothing all day but lodge Spam reports?
Let's please not try to put everything in neat little boxes and ignore the complexity of the problem. I truly believe that can only lead to heartache :(
2. Does this only apply when you've received a manual penalty? If you disavow links without a manual penalty, does anything happen?
Yes, I see uplift in both impressions and clicks for clients who had submitted to the disavow tool at least a week before Penguin 2.0 arrived. Unfortunately, for someone I spoke to who disavowed only 48 hours before the update went live, the disavow did not help at all.
Two things to consider here:
1) I would hope that something as simple to catch as Disavow List = Webmaster Tools Download List would be an obvious failsafe. It seems from this post that such a check would catch that you had made a mistake and signal that the Disavow should be ignored.
2) In a hangout some months ago, John Mueller indicated that "half a year" should be long enough for all domains/URLs added to the Disavow Tool to be crawled. Time may be a factor.
Phew! OK, I'm done.
Thanks for the post Cyrus - great topic for discussion.
Sha
I hope so it will help. I am also penguin fighter, I made Disavow report for my Drugs store site yesterday with 824 domains
like
domain:domainname.com
now Let's see how much time Google needs for consideration.
Samee Ullah Feroz @ oDesk
You can certainly use the Disavow tool without submitting a reconsideration request if you have not been hit with a manual penalty. There is absolutely no reason to do a reconsideration request unless you have been notified of an manual penalty - there is nothing to reconsider! If you were hit by Penguin, it is algorithmic and not a manual action, so a reconsideration request would do nothing.
Speaking of Penguin being an "algorithmic" penalty ... Unless I have completely misunderstood everything from the past year, Penguin is not part of the algorithm. It is a filter that gets run once in a blue moon (a seven month gap in this last case between the last Penguin filter run and the new, supposedly bigger, badder Penguin).
Any links you remove manually or that you disavow will do nothing until the next run of the filter. That is why you saw the jump on the 22nd. They finally ran the filter again after seven months and the manual removal of links or disavowed links were picked up by the filter. Until they run the next iteration of Penguin, anything you do right now in terms of link removal or disavowing will have absolutely no effect on rankings. You'll just have to wait and hope something positive happens on the next Penguin algorithmic filter run, whenever that may be.
I should add that until I saw Marie's comment, I was going to suggest that there was a fourth possible reason that Cyrus saw no drop in rankings, which is that the tool does absolutely nothing at all. It could exist purely to help Google identify bad websites and they are using you to help them find those sites. Marie's bump on the 22nd suggests that the tool might actually do something. Of course, it could also be that she contacted websites and had some bad links manually removed during the last seven months and THAT is what caused the jump on the 22nd - not the disavow links tool. I have no way of knowing whether she did do that and certainly no way of testing that rather cynical theory.
I have seen a similar bounce-back on my site around that time, without any disavows. I think there may have just been a tweak to the algorithm so it works better given the feedback they had up to that date.
Always the best!! When can we expect a Cyrus Shepard SEO Bible!? Great stuff !, specially now with Penguin season. I was having severe doubts about disavowing, your opinions lead me to try much harder in the creation on content so i dont have to worry about disavow and delete. Thanks!!
SEO Bible? I like the sound of that.
I have to imagine that Google is in no particular hurry to discredit every link every site owner has submitted through the disavow tool. Do I think it could help a site--yes, eventually, But it's not as if you submit 100 links today and by tomorrow morning you're back in the game. Your test showed no impact after 2 months. Has Google just not gotten around to it yet? A safe-guard would be wonderful but sounds too good to be true.
Hi Cyrus Shepard
After penguin 2.0 launched my keywords suddenly goes down, but i never got any mail for unnatural links in google webmaster tool, so is it beneficial if i am going to remove some links which are not proper with use of disavow tool, my some links are redirect to other sites and also some has not found page error, so please let me can i go through use disavow tool for improving my keyword ranking position.
Thanks
Hi,
I guess you haven't read whole post
Read : "7 Pro Tips for Google's Reconsideration request" which Cyrus mentioned in this post.
Wish I had a solid answer for you, but I would first focus on cleaning up those bad links.
HI Cyrus
Thanks a lot for your awesome information.
Actually i got links (links from 0-2 page rank) related to some search engines result, redirection to other sites and 404 errors pages from webmaster latest links, so i have bit confusion about which links are going to disavow tool. I have lots of links which are redirect to others site which are not proper, also i have list of links which are related to other search engines result and also a list of 404 page not found links, so can you please help me about which links should be removed.
Thanks
I'm doing a few tests as well on the Disavow tool, so I'm subscribing to this as I want to see what your updates are. Thank you.
Hi Cyrus,
I'm a newbie to the Moz Blog - the amount of brainpower and effort going into Penguin recovery and manual actions taken is remarkable. Glad that people like you take this stuff on head first...
I'll soon be filing a reconsideration along with a disavow request, and noticed something in this post "When finished, take any links that return a 404 and download these into a spreadsheet. Be sure to include these dead links as "Removed" when you submit your reconsideration request to Google, otherwise they may not know about them." When you say include them as Removed, is this just an FYI to Google, or something to include on the disavow list -- or something else?
Thanks Cyrus! This post answered a few questions for me. As I do in-house SEO and my team and I have never done any suspicious or unnatural link building I don't foresee having to use or even think about using the disavow tool anytime soon, but I am glad to get some clarity on when it could be useful.
Thanks for the kind words. Best of luck!
Someone in my niche hired a negative seo company to build thousands of spammy links to my site. I have not taken any dive in google from them, however I still want to remove them. I take a lot of pride in my website, and it sickens me this is how some people get to the top.
Are there any DMCA tools that will shoot a request to a large group of sites, demanding removal of a blog comment link or spammed wiki page / user profile?
Cyrus and others - I really need your advice. A while back my site was hacked and hijacked. We fixed this, but the hackers continue to create bad quality inbound spammy links, and there are over 100,000 now. Of course its impossible to make a dent in getting them removed. We hired a company to do a link disavow and its been several months. We don't see any change, and new links continue to be built by the hackers. We don't have any manual actions or security problems, so it appears there's no way to file a reconsideration request. We thought of moving to a new site, but I'm told we can't forward visitors from the current site to a new site without passing along the negativity of the bad links. Also we have a ton of great articles and content on the site, and I'm concerned google wouldn't give us credit for us if we move the site without forwarding. In the meantime the drop in google ranking is impacting the business. Nobody seems to know exactly what we should do. Can this site be saved or is there something else we can or should do?
Same situation here :( ... any luck with fixing the problem?
Cyrus, As usual, you post a great and timely piece that is thought out and provides actionable data. Given that we are in the middle of this with a larger new client, it is timely. Note: With clients we run them weekly to biweekly in ahrefs, Screaming Frog, etc. along with other tracking software, ranking software, etc.
With this new client, about a month in we discovered that links had increased in two days from about 5k to 6200. (around late March) Most from a single domain. As we researched, we discovered the previous firm had submitted the client site (possibly even after we took on the client) to a lot of paid services for directory postings to many directories. One domain from one directory was out of control. Unfortunately, our discovery was well ahead of Google showing links in WMT which meant there was no disavowal action to take. We did begin trying to contact the webmaster to no avail and obviously keep all correspondence, etc. It took nearly a month before we could disavow the domain as soon as we saw the first link appear in Google. We knew in advance domain disavowal would be our tactic as the links were continuing to increase. As of May 1 roughly 6 weeks from first occurrence they were nearing 20K links and anchor text was nearly identical for the main keyword. Today they surpassed 28K links.
The disavowal went in around the 1st and as of the Penguin update the 22nd, client was ranked #2 or 3 for the main term and 7 for secondary. Today, they are on page two for both and the decline is daily. So, no help to now from disavowal. Obviously, we are doing other things along with this, but the water remains too muddy from Google. The problem is simple and unchanged. If the disavowal tool cannot be used in a way that produces a visible and measurable result, how am I able to prevent someone from sabotaging our site or client sites? Based on the impact this is having on the client, beyond the fact I do not do these type things, why would I not simply go submit the top competitors to my client to these same sites and insure destruction of the vertical? At least then, the field would be leveled.
At some point Google has to develop a method wherein we can say, this is here, we do not want it, that is it. Forget trying to decipher who got the bad links themselves and who got sabotaged, just allow the site owner, SEO, etc. to say this doesn't count and never will. Another possibility would be to truly design in a reciprocal link negation factor into the algorithm. We know some reciprocal links "void" one another, but design in a mechanism that allows me to link back to a linking site and by virtue of the algorithm invalidate links either way. This would require no additional digging, massaging, etc. if page A on Site 1 has a link from page Z on Site 2 and the reverse is also true, then the net value of either link is zero. So, I see a link that is not supposed to be there, boom, I throw a link in and erase it.
It's late, I am tired, so you guys punch a hole or two in this if I am off my game.
Best as always Cyrus, really!
To be honest, although I've seen the disavow work numerous times in lifting penalties, less than 1/2 those times actually resulted in raising traffic. Seems to work best on large sites with robust link profiles, where a manual penalty was suppressing otherwise healthy traffic.
A bad situation, to be sure.
I wish that Google had the same transparency policy Moz does. That is all.
Disavow ALL the links to your site??!!! What the heck is wrong with you? Why would you want to do that?
Cool tips! Thanks for sharing Cyrus!
I was doing link audit for the first time today with a little bit help from tools and manual works. It was very tedious and large scale. I’ve busted almost 300 bad links so far and I “can’t wait” to contact them to get the links removed. Buzzstream is a really good tool for outreach. I love their feature of tracking the sites’ contact details automatically. The other tools you recommended seems very cool too. Do they have any other advantages over Buzzstream? Can you please advise which tool you like most and why? (I’m still very new to the SEO industry and I’m always up to good tool recommendations)
It was very brave of you to disavow all links to your website, by the way.
Cheers,
Trang Lam
Cyrus, I guess I'll be the guinea pig. I disavowed every spammy link on a domain that was hammered by Penguin 1. Nothing changed with Penguin 2.0 even with me removing some of the spammy links. Most of the webmasters ignored my request and I even tried the service remove'em. I figured what the heck let's try disavow. I literally hand checked 1200 domains (and took a Machete to quote Matt Cutts) before I put them in my txt file for the disavow tool. I uploaded the file 3 days ago and filed a reconsideration request even though my drop in ranking was algorithmic and not a manual penalty. We'll see if I get any movement or any type of response in GWMT
Mark, I too have experienced a drop in ranking for one keyword phrase only and is most certainly related to the new algorithm and not a manual penalty. We have been "under attack" for eight months with low quality links and I have been using the disavow tool regularly since last Oct. I've refreshed our home page and had one final blast at the disavow tool so hopefully if I can keep on top on the 10K plus links a week I am getting we can recover. I did use the tool Cyrus mentioned, link detox, it has been a saviour!
Good luck with GWMT response.
Please update us on your findings when you have any. I find it interesting that those doing case studies on the workings of disavow only find more unanswered questions. I agree that for google's claimed transparency they only seem to stay in the grey.
Would be nice if Google took a leaf out of BING Webmaster's book and just have a simple Disavow request form. I have been using their service for this with no problems - easy.
Does it work though? To be confirmed
Good and timely post Cyrus as I'm currently experiencing a dramatic increase in 'DIRECT' Taffic on our site and its skewing our direct traffic BR, I can see a lot of irrelevant domains linking to us and I just want an easy way to get rid of them!
Best
David
Very educative and important post for me. Even all the discussion and different perception help me much to understand with core reality about Disavow. To be very honest SEOmoz has become my prominent and most important learning source. Firstly I came to know about disavow links by reading "Yin and Yang of Disavow ". Now, reading this post, I came to know how it can actually help to get our website links penalty free or benefits of disavow tool.
Thank you so Cyrus for such a wonderful and elucidate post.
I know I'm slow out the blocks on this one...
But, seeing I'm in the process of clearing out some suspicious looking links from our backlink profile (as determined by the Link Detox tool combined with a healthy dose of painstaking human evaluation), here are my thoughts on this excellent, yet inconclusive experiment (with the hugely beneficial assistance of hind-sight):
Disavowing 100% of your links is probably outside of a "normal" threshold/band of links to disavow in one fell swoop. I'm not entirely surprised Google ignored your request.
@Cyrus - if we had say 6 domains. All with a very similar (or even identical?) backlink profiles, then we could run an experiment where by we disavow 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the backlink profile of each domain.
This technique may yield some conclusive results?
Anyone out there with domains of this nature they're willing to offer in the name of science?
Or anyone done something like this?
Really interesting, speaking as a site owner of an ecommerce site who has been slapped by G because of a bogus SEO company it is impossible to know what to actually do. We tried to go through with a fine toothcomb and only disavow the bad. After 4 failed resubmissions i took the difficult decision to use the disavow tool like a bulldozer as oppose to a spade. we disavowed everything in webmaster tools except 10 links that were 100% top notch. Still it came back rejected. We then had to disavow links Google was not even showing which seems ridiculous that they are turning down our reconsiderations for links that they are not even showing me.
Effect has been unsuprisingly quite negative but not back to square one. The key for me is i did not want a manual link penalty hanging over our head not knowing how much of an effect this would have on our website in the futute. At least now we can start going forward without having to look over our shoulder
Wow, I can't believe you disavowed all your site's links. Now that's taking one for the team! Seems like Google should be a little more open about the tool, mainly how and when to use it. I think secretly they are using the tool to help find spam, it makes a good lead source!
I took a new job, so I didn't really need my site anyway.
Feel free to send it my way and I'll change my name to Cyrus :)
Hey Cyrus,
Glad to hear that Google didn't let you destroy your own site :-) Great post and thanks for experimenting for the rest of us
Great article Cyrus. It really underlines just how tricky the disavow tool has made things and how little information Google has given us.
We've also seen that it's the effort Google sees you putting in that is really the key to being successfully reconsidered. If you get one bad link removed out of 100 before asking for reconsideration, then you're probably going nowhere. But if you've removed a decent proportion of them ("decent proportion" - that's the million-dollar question!) then we've found a reconsideration is much more likely to be taken seriously.
Keep on truckin'.
Hi Cyrus,
This is my first post on SEOMoz and now you're scaring me ;-)
Thanks for the informational post.
George
Hey George!
Welcome to the blog :)
Sha
Thanks Sha!
Hi George! I suggest you start with the Beginners Guide to SEO and browse our Learn SEO section.
Best of luck!
Great stuff Cyrus!
*Brainstorming* - It could be that Disavow checks for any Manual Penalty for Unnatural links / a Penguin hit signal on the Domain as a precondition in order to take effect automatically.
Tricky it is, indeed..
Will you suggest to make a reconsideration appeal even if my site is not affected by any updates.
Really detailed and helpful post as I have been toying with the idea of Disavow for a few weeks, I think with positive link building and link removal hopefully can get rid of some bad client links without it
Nice post Cyrus. It is always better to start a new online business in same niche and do everything right rather than waiting for so long. Because, Google is always very slow in reconsideration process. Building a new website and promoting it by targeting long tail or local area keywords would be great option to get some business meanwhile Google works on reconsideration.
I waited two months and nothing happened. I think your numer 2 "The disavow has built-in safeguards in order to protect you from disavowing good links, or..." is the most reasonable one
Risky.
Thanks for this post. I tried disavow this weekend, it is Monday now and no movement yet, thanks
Interesting. I haven't yet had to use the disavow tool (and hope I won't be using much of it in the future!)
I think everyone will have to at some point in time. You cannot control 100% of the links to your site.
Question: What will do overwriting disavow list in GWT?
How about dead links in section "links pointing to Your site"? Do I have to put them ot the disavow list?
Every one is talking about Disavow links or tool but I just want to know that how much time Google will take to take this in process or ignoring in crawling those links and will site get back to its previous position??
Appreciate the text file formatting graphic. Thanks for posting that.
Can anybody suggest me that what happened if i upload the disavow file even if my site is not affected by any updates.
has anyone seen proof of links being disavowed except serp results changing?
i mean after disavowing have you noticed the domains you disavowed disappearing from the domain google shows you on you webmaster tool?
do i have any indication that links were disavowed by google besides change in SERP?
Interesting study Cyrus. The thing that gets me though is you disavowed all your links, then Penguin comes and your rankings drop (only a little). If Google all of sudden did ignore all your links you disavowed then surely your rankings would be more like 50+ even 100+.
That's why it seems to me you were hit by Penguin alone and it didn't really have anything to do with you disavowing your links.
Although as you have now removed your disavow file I may be proved wrong. As if your rankings do come back this would correlate to the disavow file and not Penguin.
Unfortuneatly, if the folks we talked to at Google are correct, the disavow file won't update until the next major update (possibly Penguin again) so we may never know.
Another possibility is that once the links are disavowed, they never come back.
Great post, thanks for the share!
I can say - I have never used this before - and debate using it.
Thanks for the post I helped heaps
I have a domain in a competitive area in Australia that has struggled for a few months and took another hit recently - I only do this part time and so I was unaware of disavow - while I knew some bad links existed my previous efforts to remove them form the web sites had failed.
I submitted a disavow request on 31st May with no request for reconsideration and received confirmation on the 4th June that links had been updated. In past 24 hours my hardest hit keywords have jumped over 50 places and hopefully still rising.
Now I will spend even more time and go through the rest of my links - as this is obviously very worth the effort.
I am using Google Disavow Tool but this post helped me a lot to increase my effectiveness. I really admired the Link Removal Research Tools: Link Detox, Remove’em and SEOgadgets. Its an outstanding post to understand the usability of Google Disavow Tool.
This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution.if used incorrectly.this can potentially harm our site performence.
Hi Sir
My Site Hits By Penguin, So Please Help Me How can Recover My ranking, Disavowed tools May Help me?, Remove Bad Link Are option? plz help me
Hi Cyrus
Great write up and 10 out of 10 for having the @$%G to disavow 35,000 links.
The big question is do you have to wait for a penguin refresh or is it built in to G's daily algorithm?
We are cleaning up multiple backlink profiles currently which are down to previous poor SEO companies doing link spam, link diversity which most people are guilty for as keyword anchor links have work for years and just generally cleaning up.
What we have found is that whether you use Google webmaster tools, moz, ahrefs, majesticseo or other tools to obtain your backlinks you have to manually visit every website you have a link on. You have to manually visit every link as for example majesticseo would not know that Google has manually penalised a domain and stripped their pagerank so by only using majesticseo measurements are not good enough. Also we come across domains that have a great trust rank, a great page rank yet you do a site search and they have been completely de-indexed by Google and no longer exist in the SERPS! Google leaving the pagerank but de-indexing. Very interesting.
Well done Google, Penguin is actually cleaning up the web, we have found hundreds and hundreds of low value directories, wordpress sites all shutting down as they are longer any use.
What we have found is that during the clean up that rankings do improve, this indicates that penguin is built into the daily algorithm which we all know. Building great links from authoritative domains also show ranking improvements. BUT BUT BUT if a site has been hit by penguin can they fully recover without using the disavow tool? We can all guarantee that on some sites there are no contact details, no whois details, no online form to fill out, though for some paid directories you can always go through the steps of buying a link through paypal, but before paying grabbing the email address in the paypal account and using this as a contact email.
You are left with a list of domains that you want to disavow, they are either link spam, on low valued sites, completely unrelated or the website value could be good but the anchor needs to be changed but there is no one to contact to change it.
You submit your list of links to disavow and basically wait, hope and prey.
My theory, please shoot me down as on my 3rd glass of wine. (now 4th when reading this before submitting, terrible grammer i know.)
Google only do a refresh approx every 3 months, why? I believe this is because they must averagely index 70 to 80% of the world wide web every 3 months. If they refresh penguin any earlier it is almost going to be the same as the previous update. Ok ok I know its not every 3 months but they must have to leave it long enough to have enough fresh data to work with.
follow me: Google is scanning the web over a few months.
They decide to run penguin.
Your backlink profile at this point as a whole shows 50% spammy links, 60% keyword rich anchors.
This does not flag up to be reviewed as a manual penalty yet it causes an algorithm penalty which causes a 10 page drop for your main keyword phrase. This penalty may stick with you until the next refresh.
If you start to build quality backlinks, create linkable assets etc etc you improve your rankings, if you start deleting some of the poor links you start to increase rankings.
You submit your disavow file, from what I have read this can take up to 3 to 4 weeks to be processed. The links you have submitted to Google have a tag attached to them similar to a nofollow tag, but this only happens when Google next indexes the page the link is on.
Imagine you submit say roughly thirty odd thousands links to be disavowed. 2 to 3 weeks for this to be processed. Then anywhere between 1 day and 6 months for Google to find all of these links and add a nofollow tag. You are talking 7 months for this to fully take affect. I feel rankings would slowly drop over a 6 month period and not instantly.
Your disavow file is processed before the next penguin refresh.
Google index all pages your disavowed links are on and adds a nofollow tag before the next penguin refresh.
Google then refresh penguin.
They establish
40% improvement on spammy links, 40% improvement on keyword rich anchors and the rest are disavowed and indexed.
The penalty is removed :)
Or not :(
Hi Cyrus,
a few months ago I noticed a decrease in my traffic. However, at the end of March I suffered an huge decrease in traffic (about 80%).I did not receive any information from Google and I am not using any back SEO tactics (at least that I know of), so I filled a reconsideration to Google.
I was informed that this was not a manual penalty, but a result of the change in the algorithm.As I am not sure what caused this penalty (if I can call it that way), what can I do to identify the root-cause and solve it?
BTW, here is the link to my blog https://visitarnovayork.com
Thank you for your help.
I recently took over SEO for a site that employed a crappy seo company beforehand - nothing extremely bad but article spamming and bad links. I am hesitant to use the tool to disavow links but came across a linking site infested with malware. I think I should use it for this site but I'm hesitant to use the tool because I've been focussed on getting the content on the site up to speed and we are seeing some good results. Should I let sleeping dogs lie? I don't know.
I did a link disavow tool for a client before Penguin 2.0. All of the links we did in the tool are still showing up in Links to Your Site -- is this tool supposed to remove them from there? Or just devalue them?
I have read that Google still shows the sites in the Links to Your Site page, even if you have disavowed them.
This was helpful.
Any updates on results after you deleted the disavow file?
Cyrus, whats new about this post? I really want to know what happened after you removed the file.
In regards to your last line on the edited post.
Once the Disavow File has taken effect there is no turning back. The links are gone and not counted towards your site. Removing the file from the disavow tool wont change that so I would recommend you start building some links and recover slowly.
best of luck
Disavow Tool is good and handy when comes to lift penalties. Complete waste of time is writing to webmasters with link delete request. The truth is: the lower quality of website, the harder to contact to its webmaster.
I know this an old post but it's still coming up in Google searches, so Google thinks it's relevant! For your readers, and those that come in via search like I did, it really should be updated. Tim Grice is correct, Google ONLY processes the disavow when they refresh the algorithm. The post eludes to that, but is also pretty grey. I'd like to also know what others have asked, how did your site do once you removed the disvow links and another Penguin update happened?
still people are reading this useful pose as like me :)
Thank you for this post, I am reading this religiously because I am considering using Google's disavow tool. But Reach Out (3) will be my first plan of action.
You have to wait for the Google Penguin algorithm to run again before they will take into account your disavow file. Last ran October 2014, most likely will run again before the end of the year.
I have bought some backlinks from this guy:
https://www.fiverr.com/seowarlords/build-4-x-pr4-p...
and my website got penalized.... Three months after disavowing all of them, nothing has changed...Should i contact them directly?
id say this article needs an update. id like to make some amendments for Moz's or the authors review. Let me know and ill get started. Some key points have changed and i think that it should be reflected since this article ifs rom 2013 and its now 2015.
Thank You for this article.It is very useful for my website.Really i enjoyed.
Hi I have uploaded disavow links on 22nd march & now my keywords are dropping repeadily. When can i expect my keywords to be in good position & when can i start posting blogs & articles, Any suggestion? I want to recover it soon.
Thanks
How much research did you put into the disavow list? This may or may not be related to your disavow, but if it is, it will mean that you could be disavowing links that Google sees as positive links to your site. y
Hi Alexcoop,
David is absolutely correct about being sure that you have not disavowed links that are not unnatural, BUT it is highly unlikely (I want to say impossible, but that would be foolish :) that your disavow upload has had any effect at all on your search rankings.
In the vast majority of cases it takes a great deal longer than a week for the domains in a disavow file to be crawled and to then any resultant change take effect.
If the drop in search visibility has suddenly occurred over the past week or even over the past couple of months, it is highly likely that domains linking to your site have been discounted as part of a sustained effort by the Google Webspam Team to identify and devalue networks that they believe are being used to manipulate search rankings.
There have been notifications from Google of various networks in a range of countries that they have devalued recently because they believe that they are operating in a way that breaches the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines.
These kinds of large scale devaluations can cause huge shifts in search visibility - especially if you have either a very small backlink profile or one that primarily includes links that are devalued.
It would be a good idea to take a look at the history of link network "takedowns" and see if there are any significant shifts in your search visibility that match up with the devaluation of particular link networks ... where those networks are easily identifiable by name or country of origin, you should be able to see whether the links in your backlink profile match up at all.
Since Matt Cutts generally notifies of these network takedowns on twitter, you can easily identify the dates and network types by running a quick search in Twitter for @mattcutts + network
You could also use other Moz resources like Mozcast and the Google Algorithm Change History to identify times when volatility in the SERPs might match up with changes in your own search visibility.
If you have done all of that and can genuinely see no correlation with network takedowns and/or other volatility in the SERPs, then it might be time to give serious consideration to whether you might have included high value domains with good natural links in your disavow upload. I say high value domains, because they would need to be that in order to get crawled often enough for their inclusion in the disavow to take effect so quickly.
Hope that helps,
Sha
I was actually trying to find information on a different kind of "disavow" option that may or may not be an actual google thing. Several times over some months, I have received an email message that says a new Gmail account with a name quite similar to my name as used on my Gmail is being associated with me. The google will answer no questions about what is going on. It looks quite official, but makes no sense that I can figure out.
Within these mysterious email messages, there are several links, including a link near the end that says I can "disavow" the new account. Since I have no idea what the new account is about and I'm not certain about any of the links (though they do seem to be pointing somewhere into google.com), I'm not about to click on them. The entire thing smells like some kind of booby-trap. Perhaps it is so insidious that the google hasn't figured out how to disarm it and that's they don't want to answer any questions about it?
Searching the Web led to this rather interesting blog article on a different kind of disavow option, but maybe someone can say something about why I would need to disavow such an email account? I really can't even imagine a scenario whereby such a thing should have any semblance of legitimacy and therefore be in need of disavowing...
In the end, I think the google has gone all EVIL on us. Remember the joke about "All your base are belong to us" from a Japanese game called Zero Wing? The new google version is "All your attention is belong to the google."
This is a very informative post! I have a new client whose homepage seems to be affected. I made some research and it seems their previous SEO agency were charging my client lots of money to do nothing but create fake blogs with lots of pages (I've found at least 150) full of links with exact match anchor links directed to my client's homepage.
A competitor is ranking higher for all our target keywords, even though DA/PA is much lower than my client's. My client's pages rank much lower, but the ranking page is not even the homepage, instead it is a very deep, not really relevant page.
Do you guys this my client's homepage has been penalized (no notification was sent at all), due to all these spammy links from the previous SEO nightmare agency? It seems the relationship between my client and these guys has gone a bit sour, so it'll be hard to ask them to remove these links. What would you guys do? Disavow?
Thanks a lot!
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for great information.
I have one doubt that when should we remove text file from disavow tool?
Thanks for a detailed insight Cyrus!
Hello Cyrus,
This is very informative. Fortunately, I was able to resolve this issue earlier. I manually removed almost all bad links in my sites. It was a lot easier since I already organized all my links and easily identified the bad links. I only use disavow tools as a last resort. Anyway, thanks for sharing this article.
Just curious if @MattCutts ever commented on any of this. Shall prod him through twitter.
Hi Friends,
help me out, its really urgent!!!!!
2013 Lastweek of July i uploaded one file in disavow tool, now Google is not considering those links, now i want to remove that file from disavow tool. IS Google will re-consider those links or not.
If i removed that file from disavow tool will it give any effect to my website.
Help me out friends...
Thank you..
Hi radhatg,
If you remove domains and/orURLs from the disavow file that you uploaded to the disavow tool, Google will, over time, re-include them as links that you wish to count in your backlink profile.
If they are links that you felt were hurting you before (and I cannot see why you would have disavowed them otherwise), then you should expect that they will once again have a negative influence on your site's visibility in search results :(
In fact, while talking with Matt Cutts recently at SMX West, he made the specific point that some people are doing this to try to gain back the power of their manipulative links once a manual action is revoked and that the webspam team can detect when it happens.
On the whole I would say that it is a very bad idea to remove disavowed links and/or domains from the disavow file unless you genuinely believe that you have disavowed natural links by mistake.
Hope that helps,
Sha
Hi all Mozers, many doubts about the ability to realize the benefits with a disavow method. Let me give you a summary of my story, I currently work with this website Famastudio that with only 20 good quality links gained placement in just 3 months, but my main site is Fumini, Linkdetox Tool marked "over 3000 deadly risk" and after cecking I sent disavow file is processed by linkdetox and I proceeded to remove all the "wide links" or "footer links" but the result after more than a month is that the site continues to lose positions ..... I think is a very difficult case
Great article!
I think I read it the first time few months ago when I've a client with a lot of spammy links from phpld sites and had to go through a lot of links, so I've made this:
https://eggmetrics.com/tools/backlink
Still under development but, it helped me a lot creating sublists with the backlinks and go though them much faster.
Hi Cyrus, It seems your rankings are sinking:
seo blog----------------------- 100+
best seo blogs------------------ 35
how to use google disavow--- 9
build spaceships --------------- 10
find bad backlinks -------------- 20
google disavow tool------------ 20
Even after your de-disavowing you haven't seen any improvement to your earlier rankings?
Yeah, it really helps to prevent from negative SEO by removing unnatural links.
Great article!
Hi Cyrus Shepard
Thank you very much for this post. This information is very useful for us. Information about google disavow tool is very nice. I have learnt new thing with the help of yours. Please keep it up.Thanks
Hi Cyrus Many Thanks for sharing this experiment with us. I really appreciate it. I saw the your analytics graph thats from March 29 till mid of May. After the Penguin 2.0 launched did you saw any changes in traffic? I know penguin 2.0 is just a week old but your insights would be appreciated.
Thanks
Thanks Cyrus Shepard for giving us such a very helpful info. Actually I am going to use disavow tool but I had not more idea about this but thanks to you for giving me very informative post.
I think I will never use this tool, even if one of my website lost trafic suddenly. It's too dangerous, like a black box.
Has anyone actually had success with this? I've heard mixed results, and am really confused.
Why google is not removing the backlink urls where spiders are not able to find links. I mean if domain of any directory or blog has expired then google shouldn't count those as a backlink. Expiring of the domain is not in our hands and google shouldn't count that. Also when page position of links change in the directory then google has to consider the only page which has links on it, but instead of this google also consider previous pages where links will be not found because of position changed.
Please provide your opinion..
Its a great article Cyrus,
I have tried to remove the naughty backlinks pointing to one of my clients website and was successful without filing for Disavow tool and the manual penalty was revoked. I think doing it manually is far better than going for Disavow tool.
There was a google hangout about the disavow tool, a few days ago. Worth taking a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsDeu5PUx2A
I've used the disavow tool a few times (mostly on sitewides) but haven't noticed any changes. I always try to get more links anyway to balance out the link count.
Very good post but removing one by one link is very difficult for anybody.
Hi Cyrus,
As one of my client site is dropped ranking after Penguin 2.0 update. I have started link removal task and just downloaded links list from Google webmaster tool. In this list I found a link with IP Address i.e (https://50.28.6. 227/detail.php?id=86754) but actually domain name link is (https://www.21stguru .com/detail.php?id=86754)
As I contact this webmaster several times then also link is not removed. So, Now I want to disavow this domain. Then do I have to disavow by using "domain:21stguru .com" OR "domain:50.28.6. 227" OR Both?
Hi Kiran,
You should disavow the domain.
The disavow tool works at domain level.
Sha
Yes, your right Sha. I got it that I have to disavow the domain but my question is do I have to disavow by using "domain:21stguru.com" (i.e by domain name) OR "domain:50.28.6.227" (i.e by using IP Adress) OR Both?
As list of links which have downloaded from Google webmaster tool is showing link with ip address which I mentioned in the above comment.
If I disavow domain:21stguru.com then will Google also disavow domain:https://50.28.6.227/? OR I have to disavow both?
As https://50.28.6.227/ is not redirected 21stguru.com
Hope you got my question.
If in doubt, disavow both. No harm will come. :)
Thanks Cyrus for your reply
Thanks for this. I'm very hesitant to use the disavow tool but it;s good to have it there as a last resort.
The links / domains in the disavow file will get the "nofollow" attribute only on Google's side (so those won't pass page Rank) only when the links are processed one by one - and for some links that can even mean 6 months.
In other words if you have 1000 links listed in the disavow file 50 can be processed in the first 24h after the upload another one in the next 48h and so on and since people are usually disavowing (is this a word ?) spammy links that are getting re-crawled only once every several months - the effect can take some time.
On manual actions there is still click involved from someone from Search Quality team and they will review the disavow and see if the links listed in the case file for that manual action aka penalty are listed or not (or removed - and that is why Google's official suggestion is that you should also add links you've also removed - and that in the beginning sounded strange but now it make sense - also on the idea that they are building up a database to feed the algoritm with more info).
...
Thanks for the solid post Cyrus. Good stuff as always.
If only Matt Cutts could be as concise with his broadcasts as you are. That 9 minute "disavow links" video was as circular and repetitive as it gets.
I'm still confused as to why the disavow file needs to be uploaded to Webmaster Tools. Why can't we host it like a robots.txt or xml sitemap?
Because then it will be public .. for all to see.
I used the disavow tool for the first time today but overlooked the required coding format of the text file so thanks for drawing attention to that detail, Cyrus.
The file would probably have been ignored but there's nothing from Google to alert you at the point of disavowing.
I've just repeated the exercise.
Re this:
The evidence suggests one of three possibilities:
I feel like Google should officially address this and fully support / provide complete information on how the tool they provided actually works to give us confidence in it.
John Mueller of Google, who is a favorite of the community and generally very gracious with his time, replied - albeit obliquely - through a Google+ thread started by David Sottimano:
"This came up in our office-hours hangouts before - the disavow links tool works fully automatically. However, if you have a manual action, you will always need to submit a reconsideration request (in addition, if you're using the disavow links tool). For algorithmic issues based on links, we have to recrawl the links before the disavow takes effect. "
Not a complete answer, but I'll take it.
The evidence suggests one of three possibilities:
---
Actually, Google says that it uses the Disavow tool similarly to a nofollow/noindex tag. Meaning, when you disavow a link, add a nofollow tag to a link or add a noindex tag to a page, Google will strongly consider your command, but can choose to ignore it for whatever reason. In Cyrus' case, Google is probably choosing to ignore his commands for several reasons including i) you removed ALL back links ii) you removed quality back links iii) you simply disavowed without trying to get them manually removed iv) your site is considered authoritative and valuable.
I thought the same thing Oversee. I figured google was smart enough to ignore a goofy disavow request like this.
David, I think Google have the balance right. You have to remember, this is a tool for people who have done questionable backlinks (directly OR indirectly through some form of SEO company) If they made it easy to remove poor links, it wouldn't discourage people trialing other questionable practices...
This is intended to be a long term solution to stamping out poor backlinking practice.
Its a great content even what i have analyzed during my whole work is do natural link building and you don't need any disavow tool to demote your spammy links
Thank you very much for the resource.
I disavowed spammy links to my site and got the manual penalty revoked about 2 weeks before Penguin 2.0 came out.
I removed lots of the "sub-par content", rewrote content that was worth keeping and added lots of new quality content (I know this has nothing to do with Penguin but rather with Panda).
Yet, the Penguin 2.0 bulldozer sent my website to hell and it does not look like it's coming back. It went from 18,000 - 20,000 impressions per day to 1,500 - 2,000 in less than a year.
What really hurts in this case is that Penguin updates so infrequently - just 4 times in the past year. No one knows when they might recover, if they have to wait for the next update, or if they've cleaned up the right links. Hope you can get out of this!
Excellent Article Cyrus,
I totally agree with you experiment which you have done with you website as there is no drop in traffic.
You I have mentioned 3 possibilities here, I guess there might be 2 more possibility...
1) As you haven't removed links manually first.
2) Google's web spam team may not considered it genius and ignored.
Hmmm secret tools.. well to say this I will recomend it better than before.. Cyrus you have done great job for MOzziee.. Thanks mate.. I am going through this one
This is a very useful information.. It is good to know about this Disawow tool and the advices suggested. Thank you for sharing us your solid experiment Cyrus
Cool post - hadn't considered alot of that before. Thanks.
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for having the ***** to disavow all links to your site.
How confident are you that the ranking drops you experienced when Penguin 2.0 was rolled out are linked to the the links you disavowed? The reason I'm asking is because many sites experienced similar ranking drops on the same day without having disavowed/removed any links.
My gut feeling is that as Penguin 2.0 has addressed more types of manipulative links, what you saw is the collateral damage of some links being devalued directly or indirectly. I guess you know better than anyone else what links have been pointing to your site but certainly, if Google had processed and disavowed all your links your rankings would have seen more drastic drops.
Keep us posted about the "undo" experiment :)
But Cyrus, why don't this tool work for my site: Pacific Business Capital Corporation.
Great knowledge about the disavow tool! I was afraid that the tool could be used as negative SEO, but it is not a very precise weapon at all.
I hope that Google will come up with something better than the disavow tool and instead rely on better algoritms.
is crosslinking sites bad? Can these links damage your site?
I cross link my sites, because they have similar theme.
Also If I design a site I put a link in footer, is that so bad?
I think I was hit with Penguin because of that.
Also I have 25000 backlinks to my site, how to check them all for free?
So far I had only one experiment with the disavow tool - and nothing conclusive.
Let me give you a wild idea for a test- purchase 5 new domains.
Purchase 1000 links for each site via Fiverr.
Wait for the manual pnealty message from Google.
Use the disavow tool.
Test it!
So I'm sure not the worlds biggest expert... but what I've seen is some sites I 'abandoned' after being hit by Penguin 1 (i.e. no disavow or link removal and no active link building) come roaring back since the latest updates. I've also noticed that a lot of sites with either a) no or very few links (less than 50), b) web 2.0 properties created in the last month or week c) Sites with .ru links (i.e. SAPE) are ranking highly in many niches.
This leads me to at present jump to the following conclusions - links are moving the world at present and fresh content is ranking or at least jumping past sites that are incumbent with penalties.
I think this update still has a while to run before we can draw any firm conclusions...
Great insightful post. A lot to take away. The only problem that I could really see though was
Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. The rank drop could have been attributed to any number of factors, algorithm changes, or link devaluing.
"Can you use the Disavow Tool if you haven't received a manually penalized? For example, will it work for Penguin?"
As far I as know - yes, you can. I don't remember if it was John Mueller or Kaspar Szymański, but one of them said you can use the disavow links tool if you drop in rankings as the result of Penguin Update. Only this time you don't need to send reconsideration request, which is required in case of a manual penalty.
BTW, I also noticed Google doesn't ignore all links in the disavow links file and I thought that maybe I should wait a bit longer. But when I helped with an algorithmic drops some time ago, rankings were restored right after uploading the file... but for a few days before some links were deleted before using the disavow links tool.
Great article. Nice to see such a summary.
"if it was John Mueller or Kaspar Szymański, but one of them said you can use the disavow links tool if you drop in rankings as the result of Penguin Update. Only this time you don't need to send reconsideration request, which is required in case of a manual penalty. "
Do you have any source for this? if a blogpost, video or an article. It can solve a lot of confusion
Lexy, I asked a very similar question at the Google hangout last week re this and John Mueller advised the disavow method, even though I had not received any manual warning, he didn't mention anything about reconsideration. I've since done this and refreshed my home page. If it works, I will certainly share with all here :)
Wow, Great post Cyrus! I have one client that we have submitted a reconsideration request for after trying to have links removed and then disavowing. It actually had been done multiple times but always comes back with "no manual spam action taken". This particular client got no manual spam message in GWT, and virtually no ranking improvement. There's nothing super spammy in there but definitely lots of low quality anchor-text targeted back links, primarily to the home page. We've been focusing on building quality links but still feel like the unnatural profile is really hurting us. Great info here, looking at link detox as a possible next step. Thanks!
Really an awesome article Cyrus. I was so feared about using the Google Disavow Tool. Thanking for shearing your experience and researches. Many of my confusions are now gone.
Great article, good for people thinking about using this tool so they know from the get-go that it wont be a quick fix and only one part of the effort to clean up your websites profile, especially those who like me aren't an SEO expert but have took the dive along with wearing our designer/HTML hats.
I manage two websites for a company, they had previously used a company who charged through the nose and didn't give great value for money, something I think many small businesses have had with web companies. One of the sites was unlucky enough to gain a Google quality guideline violation notice which barred it from being indexed due to links this company had built up on numerous links farms and other sites which had nothing to do with the topic of the site and were quite obviously dodgy.
After months of carefully going through the sites back-links on Webmaster Tools and emailing websites asking for links to be removed I used Disavow on the remaining seeming most websites we had a back-link didn't respond nor did they remove the link. The site was eventually re-listed last month, so for overcoming a Guideline Violation its great if you have the patience to wait.
I am still surprised to see there are so many out there who are trying to use quick fix link submission services and charging their customers hundreds if not thousands a month for ongoing SEO work - One saving grace of Penguin and Panda is these companies will either have to up their game or fold from now on!
As for the other site I managed to clean up some of the worst offending back-links myself, that site has had a noticeable dip in Key Word position over the last week which I am putting on Penguin, so let the rebuilding commence!
I finally started using the Disavow tool this month. I use the domain disavow feature instead of just the links on the domain. I can just disavow the domain (for the ones I cant get removed) and not have to worry about what links I might have failed to add to the disavow tool from said domains.
Nice experiment Cyrus. Although I must say that I wouldn't have the guts to disavow all 35,000 links I had to my site (if I ever actually had that many). It is certainly a tricky and somewhat scary tool to use.
Cyrus,
Thank you for the article I think it pretty much summarized everyone's confusion over the disavow tool.
Google is about as transparent as murky pond water.
New updates added! See the end of the post for more details.
great stuff man
Hi All,
How to find the Unnatural Links? Could you tell about that any tools available in web? am looking for suggestion
From my experience with link removal it is 100% worth removing the links manually first before moving onto the Disavow tool.
Overall but a very nice example of what needs to be done moving forward with link removal.
I don't understand why you would have to file a request or wait for an update since nowadays google is crawling sites and making changes in their index every single day. Shouldn't the Panda and Penguin updates be included in the daily ranking algo by now?
Very interesting. It makes me wonder though... Which links does Google choose to weed out and which links still have an impact.
Great post.
But I have to nitpick on the use of a non-existent word: 1000s, as in "I've disavowed 1000s of links."
The correct word is, if course, "thousands."
<<rant mode on>>
1000s should never be used in a sentence. It should never be used on a slide. It should never be used, period.
1000s not a word. Its use does nothing to enhance the credibility or professionalism of the author. It may hurt.
But use of 1000s to have reached epidemic proportions in recent months.
And it makes me crazy every time I see it.
Try saying aloud: "I've disavowed 1000s of links." It would come out: "I've disavowed one thousands of links." That makes no sense.
I've actually seen other posts in which people write about "1000s of dollars." I've also seen: "1,000's of dollars."
Did I mention all this makes me crazy?
I can't be alone.
So please consider a cry from the heart from the depths of my soul:
DEATH TO 1000s.
<<rant mode off>>
You're bumming me out….
As a fellow 'Daniel', I am disappointed in your need to rant on this topic on Moz. Possibly this should have been a response on a journalist site... You used a lot of valuable real estate that does not add to the conversation.
PS> I do like your rant tags, but I would suggest <rant mode off></rant mode off> to improve your markup validity.
Dear Moz, I just noticed another small bug with the new site... After just posting above, it suggests 17 hours ago. Incidentally this is the same time difference between Seattle and Melbourne, AUS