Tackle spammy backlink disavows with these 5 tips for 2019. Not all backlinks are healthy for a website to have. Some backlinks start off ok, but quickly show there true colors with spammy or blackhat manipulation. Eventually these toxic backlinks will either cause specific keywords to loose ranking or they could trigger a manual penalty. In any case even though backlinks are an off page SEO factor, you still have some control over them via disavows. Let’s walk through 5 tips to keep your disavowing experience positive. Backlink optimization is important to stay routine with.
Do An Indepth Backlink Audit
You cannot have a proper disavow list, without 1st doing a proper backlink audit. Regardless of having 100 backlinks or 1,000,000 backlinks, there is a good chance a few toxic links reside in your backlink profile. The only other way to find backlinks without an audit is to suffer a penalty and by that time it’s a bit late. Using Google Search Console to display backlinks to your website for the best list. Or Ahrefs or other 3rd party indexing services can be used with less complete backlink lists, but with more 3rd party metrics to help determine domain health.
There are two ways to know if you have bad backlinks:
- By Checking Backlinks Via An Audit – Great method to find problems BEFORE they start, physically checking each backlink domain for spammy signals and poor 3rd party metrics like DR from ahrefs can help but never should be used as a sole indicator.
- Keywords start to drop and all other usual suspects have been ruled out – Bad method, as the problems are the indicator of something wrong. Normally a manual or algorithmic penalties will prevent targeted keywords from ranking.
Double Check Your Spammy Backlinks
Checking the backlinks a second time isn’t wasted time since disavowing the wrong backlink, could result in serious traffic loss. It’s already a plausible possibility that traffic will be lost when disavowing the bad backlink, so how much worse do you think disavowing a good backlink will be? This is why it’s extremely important not to let just anyone disavow backlinks, keywords can stop ranking almost overnight. Especially if it was a highly weighted backlink from a very trusted source that just happened to seem spammy. Or worse yet, instead of disavowing a webpage, the whole domain was disavowed, which will just magnify the effects of keyword ranking loss.
Disavow Backlinks With Bing Too
While Bing doesn’t get the same traffic Google does, it’s not wise to forget them when it comes to webmaster tasks. Disavowing backlinks is just as important on Bing as Google, since websites want all the converting traffic they can get. Don’t limit the websites potential customer base because you don’t think many use Bing. You don’t just market to FaceBook only, you normally include Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube and maybe Pintrest or Instagram as well. So why limit search engine marketing to just one search engine?
When Adding To Disavows Keep Old Rules
One thing that isn’t always clear to 1st time backlink disavow users is, to always ADD ONTO the original disavow file. Never under any circumstances should you delete the old disavow rules. Doing so will remove the disavows for the website, and if penalties were suffered before, the penalties will return. Treat the backlink disavow list like a living document, that just gets added onto, never overwritten. This is why it doesn’t hurt to have a backup backlink disavow list saved to revert to in case such an issue does happen. Or you can get into the habit of downloading the backlink disavow list, before uploading a new one.
Be Prepared For Some Traffic Loss
Now despite backlink disavows for spammy and manipulative backlinks being a good thing for websites and the web at large. The remains the issue of websites suffering some keyword ranking loss that results in website traffic decline. This is normally, even if you’ve checked your backlink disavow list twice, and did a deep audit to find the bad seeds, some decline in web traffic will happen. This normally happens because Google isn’t perfect and will be tricked by some of the backlink schemes. Despite the keyword boost you might currently get from it, the possible resulting penalty will be much worse.
It’s better to try and cut these dead weights before they pull your keyword research and website down. Think of blackhat backlinks like a soda and good backlinks like water or a sports drink, and keyword ranking is like a race. Drinking soda for a race is only going to help maybe for the 1st part of the race, but water will help you out the whole race without slowing you down after the initial boost. This is what blackhat backlinks will do, speed up kw ranking at 1st, while eventually bringing your whole website kw rankings down when found out. Do routine backlink audits to monitor the health of your backlink profile!
Are You Having Problems With Your Backlink Disavows?
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