In today’s time and age, do you still need to disavow links? Is it even safe? If yes, then which links should you disavow? If you’re confused by this, then you’ve come to the right place! In this post, we’ll answer all of your questions.
One of the most frequently asked questions in the world of SEO today is “what type of links should I target with Google’s Disavow Tool?”
A lot of website owners are scared of the Disavow Tool, but it is a tool that exists for a reason. Before the Penguin update, site owners had to disavow links but after Google just ignored most of the bad links. It is not a perfect system, though. But there will be danger in using the Disavow Tool if you don’t know which links to disavow. You might just be targeting good links.
What To Disavow Links
Here are some links that you should be disavowing.
Penalty Examples
What should you disavow? It can be rare to get a link penalty. Google will usually provide you with sample links. However, they won’t tell you the links to disavow. They will only show you some examples, and you can go through these to look for any patterns in your links to find what matches a spammy link. You’ll have to include these in your disavow file.
Link Schemes
If you are suffering from a drop in your traffic and Google is hurting you algorithmically, you’ll have to take a look at your links. If you have been participating in link schemes and have been a little bit naughty or violated the Webmaster Guidelines of Google, you know you should disavow these links.
But what are these links? These are the ones you paid for or had someone else pay to do it for you. It is possible that someone has bought some links that are shady to bring your site down. Google is good at ignoring these, though.
Non-editorial Links
Google has already listed the non-editorial links. These are the types of links that webmasters haven’t placed intentionally. These are things like forum spam, widgets, signature spam, or shady, dodgy links that you control. You can often check these by just taking a look at the anchor text.
Anchor Text
If you find that this is a money anchor text or a high-value, money keywords, these are usually good candidates for disavowing. By checking the anchor text, you’ll already know if it is a shady link.
The “Maybe” You Should Disavow Links
There are a lot of links that can be called a “maybe” These are the links that you might want to disavow but not necessarily.
Malware
If you click on a link and it redirects you to a page or a red browser warning you that these sites contain spam or if your computer suddenly freezes up, these are toxic links.
Think like Google, who probably would not want to see these link types in a website. Would you want these to link to you? If not, it’s probably best to throw them and disavow.
Cloaked sites
These are websites that show Google a different result from what a user sees. To find these, you’ll have to use a Googlebot user agent.
You can use Chrome and get a browser extension of this Googlebot user agent. These will help you quickly find any cloaked pages. They are red flags when it comes to link quality.
Shady 404s
Shady 404s are those when you click on a link, and a page is not there. The whole domain might not be there. There are a lot of these kinds of sites. You might see these as something off, but these are just 404s. Throw these in the disavow file because these usually have no record of what the link was. It’s often a spammy link.
These were trying to rank for a particular keyword, but for some reason, they removed the domain registrar or the entire domain itself. Because you do not know what you will find, it’s best to disavow it. It won’t help you in the future when Google notices that these sites are gone.
Bad neighborhood spam
Sometimes you will find bad neighborhood links within your link profile. Examples of these are poker, porn, and pills. If a search engine finds a porn site linking to a non-porn site, you should consider it pretty shady. Avoid these spammy sites and disavow them.
Probably Okay – It’s Not Necessary to Disavow
Scraper Sites
Scraper sites are when you get a great link from an online magazine, and then hundreds of other websites try to copy it. These are scraper sites. There’s no need to put these in the disavow file since Google is getting better at assigning these links to the original site.
Feeds
In Google’s list of link report, you will probably see a lot of feed links which are raw RSS feeds, or HTML feeds. There’s no need to disavow these links if they are from good sites.
Auto-generated spam
You will find that there are sites which are automatically generated by programs and robots. These are often pretty harmless, and Google is great at ignoring them. By checking the anchor text, you will see whether or not the link is auto-generated spam or a link scheme.
The auto-generated spam usually has no optimized anchor text, and it is often broken or your page title. These are most often low-quality pages that you don’t need to put in the disavow file.
If you want to build good links to your site, you can go ahead and buy PBN sites that were once authoritative. Have a PBN checklist of private blog networks, PBN hosting, PBN domains, and PBN network that you are planning to get.
Let’s See What Experts Has to Say
Having a great backlink profile helps in increasing the authority of your site and boosting your traffic. On the other hand, having a really bad site linking to you will hurt your website. Be sure to disavow these types of links according to Kotton Grammer who is an internet entrepreneur known for founding Kotton Grammer Media in 2013 a Multi-Million Dollar Internet Advertising & Media Company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO. He has also been featured or quoted in many publications including, Inc.com, Huffingtonpost.com & Forbes.com
His Agency is ranking #1 in Google for Chicago SEO, St. Louis SEO, New Orleans SEO, Memphis SEO, Orlando SEO, Miami SEO. Kotton has also sold over $40,000,000 in digital products through webinars. Instagram, LinkedIN
Make sure to draw trends around the most common apps to figure out why the clients enjoyed them. Therefore, looking at industry dynamics and research will give you a clear understanding of what other businesses in your field have done, and you can create new features to expand the markets.
