Google disavow - okay to use?

Hi there,

My site dropped over the past year and a bit with the penguin updates etc. I used linkdetox.com to see if I had many dodgy links a basically I've got loads and it recommends I either remove the links (not possible in most cases) or use Google disavow.

Basically, has anyone used the disavow tool and had any problems?

I've read a few (possibly anecdotal) reports that in using it you could be seen as essentially saying to google "look at me, i admit it I've got dodgy links, punish me more!"

I've not received any warnings or anything communication from google at all but I've definitley been hit by penguin and would like to try and recover.

many thanks,
Nicky

 

There has been a lot of conversation about this evern since the tool came out. I have seen various tests people have done and the results have always been mixed. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but it is also mixed pointing either way.

As far as I am aware, no one really knows.

 

I was about to give it a try with 1 site some time ago, but since all are within 1 GWT account.... I've got too suspicious about it and wouldn't try it.
Just like your post above, I believe they take it as "I admit I've done smth wrong" (in their eyes), so it could get even worse.
Fuck their eyes! Do what you know and feel like is good for your own site! Manipulate the manipulators, i.e. google.
After all they are not the only, although still very significant source of traffic.

If needed start from the scratch, but nowadays I do not think the so called "bad links" are the problem. It's just their recent (few years now) politic to make their shareholders happier - via more adwords sales of course
But that's the way it goes/ends-up with such companies...

 

Here go the conspiracy theories again.

I think if people get the warning in WMT and ask themselves honestly, they would admit they had some bad links in their portfolio. In most the cases, what Google has hit as bad links do in fact seem like bad links that add no value to the consumer, just a link for the person paying for it. I mean, if you paid someone on fiver to create 500 social media accounts and then got the warning, couldn't you honestly say that purchase you made was legitimately bad?

The OP even described the links he was seeing pointing to his site as "dodgy"

 

Ya, and here comes the "negative SEO" part, which is about to, if not already became a serious market.
I wonder what Matt or anybody from google would say about it and their tool. They have implemented it under a lot of pressure from users and admitted it is not working at all now and that you have to remove your links, but still use it...i.e. admit your guilt........ or are they doing it just to gather all that data???

See it from here - if your SE do not like any or take it as a spammy link, it is very simply to code it to ignore that link/s. Not to make penalties, especially manual ones since they are so busy responding at all....

Leaving the conclusions for all of you!

 

I agree that it seems like a bad idea to point out all the stuff you think might be bad to Google. Personally I would avoid the disavow tool and just work on getting those links pulled directly (i.e. contacting the site and asking for the links to be pulled), and let it get fixed on the next crawl

 

I think if there were more evidence of the tool actually helping you recover, people would be more likely to try it. Otherwise, we are just in the place where you tell Google about your bad links, but possibly nothing happens. I guess it is something you have to think about.

 

I have never seen a case of the disavow tool working for anyone. You will be wasting your time. Feel free to look on this forum and all of the other SEO forums. The only people that think that disavow works are those people that mistaken the link removal campaign for success with the disavow.

I would be cautious of link detox tool though, they miscalculate links frequently. Overestimating links that shouldn't be removed and links that should be removed. Be careful.

 

I think what almost everyone is forgetting here is how the disavow tool actually works. It instructs Google to ignore links to your site as and when they are crawled (that is recrawled if we're being technical). So when the crawler hits any page it'll check it against the disavow database and discount any dofollow links for all sites that have instructed it to do so and count all others.

So when you disavow thousands of spammy links it can (and in most cases will) take a very long time for them all to actually be discounted from Google's ranking decision.

Furthering this if you've been hit by Penguin even if you disavow the links you're "penalty" will not actually be remedied until the Penguin algorithm undergoes a data refresh or an update. Sadly penguin is not integrated to the crawl and its effects are only readjusted every so often.

Finally when you remove links you're also stripping back your backlink profile and making it weaker (bear with me). Think about it when you initially built these links it was when they would work to help boost your website's rankings. This is no longer the case and they're now actively hurting you, so by disavowing you're pretty much going back to step 1, you still need some link strength to then replace what you've taken away...

Hope this helps

 

Hmmm, thanks for your replies guys and girls.

I'm still undecided as what to do to be honest, I might see if I can contact someone on linkdetox and see if they can persuade me, they do email me loads of cases where sites have recovered (obviously pushing their own service).

I'm not one for the conspiracy theories either but I do think that we (webmasters) seem to be doing Googles work for them by telling them what we suspect are spammy links.

I think if I had had a warning from Google I would be more likely to use the disavow tool but seeing as I haven't I think I could just be sticking my head above the parapet for the hell of it

 

Don't waste your time with the disavow tool or especially linkdetox's overpriced link "analysis" tool. You can get real results by removing links and using the money wasted on detox to hire a virtual assistant to help remove the links or by paying a service to do it for you. It's shocking people get suckered into paying detox's outrageous fee for basic analysis. You do realize they only check about 3 metrics with their tool, right? You can achieve the same results of detox's tool with Scrapebox and 20 minutes.

If you want to see any effect remove links, don't expect any results from disavow.

 

I had problem with one of my websites.
Used one guy to post links to my website, and finally got manual filter from google (seen in google webmaster tool). Some kind of "unnatural backlinks".
Used disavow, and sent there all the links from report from that guy who made me links. In a week or two manual filter dissapeared, and my site came back to positions, it had before that "cool promoter"

 

How do I really use disavow? I heard it a couple of times but still cannot understand how do you do it. Do I need to use webmaster tool to use it or send an email to Google?

 

I did it via webmaster tools, under manual filters
Than it takes for about 1 week to get reply from google is it ok now or manual filter still applies (if you haven't sent all the bad links to disavow)

 

Ok thanks for the info. I still don't know if my sites are hit by recent updates but so far they still have traffic and earnings.

 

Well if you haven't seen a drop, then I would say no, you probably were not hit.

 

Think about it this way. Google catches you for a manual penalty. Essentially you were trying to cheat Google and got caught. Now, Google just wants you to submit links to their disavow tool and they will remove the penalty? Why?

That's like getting caught for stealing and to get out of your punishment the store just wants to know what you stole, even though they already know. Does that make any sense?

Time and time again Google has told webmasters to remove links if they ever want to see a ranking recovery. The disavow tool is there as a measure of combating negative SEO and nothing more.

 

And how it is "combating" negative SEO at all? It's still unnatural links - be it being spammed from competition or done by yourself. So if I make several thousand shitty, let's say blog comments with your URL and you disavow them later, will this cope with the problem? Do not think so...

Pity, but along their greed and hypocrisy (the thing about better results that became more and more shitty) google actually created an entirely new niche - negative SEO.

 

My PR dropped from PR2 to PR0 after using Disavow tool and traffic improved 10% max.

 

Google Disvow tool is extremely useful in removing the links that are not required. It is an authoritative tool that you can trust.