How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?

[Kingalan1]

We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links.

We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results:

-42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed.

This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them>

I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once?

Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that?

Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups?

Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

[jasongmcmahon]

As Michael Edwards pointed out you need to spend some time look at the links & sites yourself to ascertain their suitability.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.

We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.

In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.

Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.

I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?

Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.

Thanks, 
Alan

[MickEdwards]

Hi Alan,

"Most  503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway. "  Yes if they are low quality non-human edited then yes i'd disavow.

"We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?" If ranking is impacted by a toxic link profile then disavowing only 75% of them will not recover you 75%, probably nothing.

"Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?" How long is a piece of string.  The timeframe depends on how long it takes Google to crawl the toxic links.

Will this improve your rankings?  I don't know is the simple answer.  The best bet is to take the links on merit and disavow the ones you know are clearly toxic, manipulated etc.  But soon as you mention improvement it makes me wonder if you have had a hit on organic traffic.  If that is the case and it was around Sept onwards you may be looking at a broader E-A-T issue so disavowing would not resolve the bigger issue.  That's pure guesswork but you get my point.

I don't know anyone who has any significant success with requesting links to be removed, other than sharks trying to charge to do so.  You could argue that the 'good' sites will help, the poor sites ignore/charge, but it's a bit too much time and effort to use that signal in any way.

Mick

[Kingalan1]

Hi Michael:

Thanks for your feedback.

Most  503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway.

We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?

Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?

Also, do you think we should reach out to these webmasters and make a written request to remove the bad links? We tried this 3 years ago and it was a total waste of time.

Thanks,
Alan

[MickEdwards]

I think the most important aspect of your question is to not trust a tool.  The tool might flag domains/URLs as spam or manipulated links but the most important thing is to manually inspect each domain.  I have had reports from tools where the domain in question is actually not a problem at all when inspected.

If you are getting 404, 403 or 503 error messages the links are gone.  You wouldn't be penalised by Google for these because they no longer exist.  There is no need to disavow because they don't exist, but you wouldn't be causing a problem if you did.  The potential issue is that those header responses 'could' change back to a 200 found.  I'd be inclined to monitor them at this stage and add to the disavow if the status changes.  A 503 header is a maintenance response so that may come back and you would want to check what you'd be disavowing, as the link may be good.

With regard to disavowing all the links.  If you have a toxic link profile you have an issue you need to address and resolve as quickly as you can, so if you determine there are 100 toxic links/domains you will want to add them to the disavow in one hit and hope that you have captured them all.

But please be aware that if some of the links are just a bit spammy/low quality then Google looks like it takes the view to ignore those links anyway.

Some things you need to manually check are:

• the relevance of the link
• the quality of the content
• the anchor text (e.g. have you got exact match, close match anchor on multiple dubious quality posts)
• the ranking of the page/domain
• the placement of the link on the page (e.g. is is a site-wide footer link).
• the quality throughout the domain
• is the link paid for but dofollow (e.g. are there signs on the site that content can be somehow 'purchased', advertorial)