Google Disavow Tool - My Experience

[Blaine]

This is a thread I said I would start if or when a disavow that I had done had any affect.

 

Here's a little background.

 

In 2011 I launched an industry/geo specific EMD related to buying used cars. It took 6 months to rank and it ranked at the top for everything related to it's topic. I was making an average of 3K per month off of it and I was very proud to say the least.

 

I made bank on this site till the middle of May 2014. I first noticed the decline on the 18th of May due to the daily leads that slowed down from maybe 6 a day to what has since then been about 2-3 a week.

 

Since the mid May 2014 nose dive this site has never recovered. My primary key phrase (EMD) for the home page went from #1 on a slide that eventually took it all the way out of the visible rankings. I could see about 800 positions down and it was nowhere to be found. But! The internal pages were still ranking. Granted they weren't at the top of the first page like they had been, but they were still there on page 3 and 4 of the returns.

 

Here are the google algo updates that MOZ has published for the date around when the slide occurred.

 

Payday Loan 2.0 — May 16, 2014

 

Panda 4.0 (#26) — May 19, 2014

 

Payday Loan 3.0 — June 12, 2014

 

Note that none of these are penguin related..

 

I tried to re write the site thinking that because it had to do with buy here pay here cars that the penalty could be payday loan related.... None of this helped.

 

So I re-wrote the entire site thinking that it could be panda related with thin content door way pages that I'd designed. I dumped those pages and hoped the new re write would help. Still nothing.

 

Throughout all of this I was fully aware that 90% of my back links were footer links. Also there was very little anchor text diversity. When I say very little I mean that out of 600 back links, 550 of them had the same anchor text. But what was making me hesitant was that I had no warning in the webmaster tools associated with this domain. It said I had no manual penalty. And their was no penguin update at or around the time of the big slide down.

 

So back on 12-9-2014 I decide F it. I'll do the disavow in incremental stages so that I know which of the back links it was that were causing the problem.

 

BOUGHT LINKS: First things first I went in on 12-9-2014 and on a domain level disavowed all of the back links that looked as though they were from PBN Sites that Niko from warrior forum used to run. And I also disavowed all of the back links that I got from Directory Maximizer. None of these were the footer links.

 

I let that go till April of 2015 and nothing happened.

 

BLOG POSTING LINKS: In April I did stage 2. I redid the disavow file and included all of back links (on the domain level) from back in the day when I did blog commenting for back links...

 

I let that go till August 2015 and nothing happened.

 

FOOTER LINKS: In August 2015 I did stage 3. I redid the disavow file again. I had bought links from a local guy. All site wide footer links that were from legitimate websites that represented small business's in Louisville KY. Hair salons, Plumbers, Golf Course, just your standard small business's.

 

All of these links had the same anchor text and they easily totaled several hundred. But I did not disavow these on the Domain Level. Instead I disavowed these links on a per page basis. There were a total of 10 sites. So I took each site and looked to see which interior site page for each site had the best metrics according to moz tool bar. I disavowed all of the other site pages on the page level across all 10 sites. This way I only ended up with 10 back links total. All 10 from different domains. All 10 with good metrics. All 10 from interior pages.

 

I have been diligent about checking this site about every other day since this last disavow.

 

Today it is back for it's primary key phrase. It's not in the #1 position. But it is back. Currently I'm seeing it in the 190th position of the organic returns. But just yesterday it wasn't anywhere.

 

What to make of it? I don't know. I never reached out to anybody for link removal. And no links were ever manually removed.

[yukon]

Why not just rank an internal page? You mentioned a couple of internal pages already sitting on page #3 & #4 of the SERPs.

[Blaine]

Why not just rank an internal page? You mentioned a couple of internal pages already sitting on page #3 & #4 of the SERPs.

 

 

That will be the plan moving forward. I'm going to let it sit a month then start back at two particular internal pages. They were the real money makers. I would love to get them back up on the first page at the top

[yukon]

 

Why not just rank an internal page? You mentioned a couple of internal pages already sitting on page #3 & #4 of the SERPs.

 

 

That will be the plan moving forward. I'm going to let it sit a month then start back at two particular internal pages. They were the real money makers. I would love to get them back up on the first page at the top

 

 

I preach silos all the time but IMO it makes more sense than ever to silo out the two pages already sitting on page #3 & #4 of the SERPs, then build fresh backlinks to those supporting internal pages instead of the two existing pages already showing in the SERPs. Sometimes pages can take a dive when building links. This way the silo supporting pages are a buffer.

[mkgg]

Interesting, thanks for this post.

 

There is something about footer links because i had a bad experience with them recently as well. I have a new site which was ranking at #4 for a few keywords without any link-building on my part (for the pages), i bought some for a keyword that was ranking on second page and it jumped to #9 but then completely disappeared and it still can't be found anywhere. The keyword ranking #4 dropped to #7 and several of my other keywords have also been dropping few positions (few disappearing completely from SERPs).

 

In my case, i think the links i bought were probably flagged or watched by Google because i used a site automaticbacklinks for that (yeah i know) but i have had impressive results with it last year (before May 2014) ranking to the top 3 positions and making good money. Never used it after that until recently to see if it was still any good, i think i may have penalized my fresh site as well with this lol, will see after google refreshes its cache as i have removed all the links now.