Using the Disavow Tool on Bad Back-links
Although my Current Residential Architectural website now occupies most of my attention I am still slowly overhauling My old Architectural website . My old website is now almost 10 years old and as such it was built with outdated technology. It isn’t mobile friendly, has link and backlink problems, uses iframes, has meta data problems and has duplicate titles and missing descriptions. Even with all these problems it still has a few thousand clicks a month and so is still worth the effort. I have recently been using Serpstat as a tool to find problems. Before using Serpstat I had been randomly trying to fix things for months…. this was to little or no effect. I found that by using Serpstat I had a methodical framework to work within and so was at last making some progress.
Unusual Anchor text Volume Pointing to One Site by Redirects is a Problem
The anchor text section of the back-links report was very interesting. I had one text anchor in particular that had over a thousand instances. The anchor text all had the same digits in it “778636” followed by my Domain name. I checked and these backlinks came from hundreds of different domains but when the link was clicked on they all seem to be redirected to the same place called “theglobe.net”. This couldn’t be good…..
Is TheGlobe a Black-hat or Negative SEO Site?
I did a bit of checking and there actually wasn’t much available about this company other than one article inquiring if it was “black hat” or not. TheGlobe.net was listed as a domain pinged by Penguin a few years ago and it is also one of the most disavowed domain names. I figured that this may be a good time to try using the Google Search Console Disavow tool. What is puzzling is the lack of information about the company that is doing this.
The links from “theglobe”seemed to come in 2 separate waves as there were large peaks in new referring domains a few months ago. My websites ranking for my most valued search results has decreased during this time and has kept on a downward path. Perhaps this was the cause?
How to Disavow Bad links with Google
I downloaded (I used a CSV file download format so I could edit the list in excel) a list of all the domain names from Serpstat that had the same questionable anchor text link. This link appears to be my catalogued page in the globe.nets list of domain names it has indexed. The list of domain names often had the word “globe” in it and the domain names were quite varied, but all had the same destination directory. A small sample of these domain names below shows the pattern. All of these had the http protocol in front of them… I will not repeat them exactly here as I don’t want a link to these pages on my website.
the-world.media/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_778/
globe.poker/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_778/
theglobe.gen.in/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_778/
the-globe.media/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_778/
the-web.in/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_778/
To use the Search Console disavow tool in cases like this it is best to disavow the entire referring domain, rather than just a specific webpage. With this in mind I deleted all of the other excel columns with other information such as acquisition date etc and the deleted the end bit of the urls so that I had a list such as below in column A
the-world.media
globe.poker
theglobe.gen.in
the-globe.media
the-web.in
So that Google can determine that these are Domains it needs the prefix Domain: in front of each of these. It is a little complicated, but a much quicker way of achieving this than editing hundreds of URLs individually is to enter =”domain:”&A1 into column B and copy this into every column B cell. This appends domain: to the start of each of the urls in column B. I then re-copied this new column and pasted back as a value to delete the formula. I then selected the column and pasted it into Notepad to get a .txt file. This file is then uploaded into the Disavow tool. The following well explained link about using the Disavow tool is a good place to start if you aren’t that familiar with excel.
How quickly will the Disavow tool affect ranking?
I will update this with another post as soon as I see some results. Hopefully this will not take too long but I’m not holding my breath….
