Did the Disavow Tool work for you?

[spunkle]

Hey,

did any one use the Disavow Tool and recover from the lastest penguin updates, may 22nd 2013? can anyone say that they only used the disavow tool and it recovered their site?

I tried the disavow tool on one of my sites for a test and it did not recover the site.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

No.

[smithaa02]

No. We've been hoodwinked. Haven't recovered with Penguin 2.0 while sites I know link build are ranking better than us. Google is not about rewarding honest practices.

[netmeg]

Google is not about rewarding honest practices

No, of course they're not. It's never been enough to follow the rules.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

The rules they set are the ones for which we were ultimately punished.

[renomart]

No recovery. Looks like Penguin 2.0 has punished me even more!

[ColourOfSpring]

I didn't use the disavow tool but I'm close to an SEO company that used it extensively. I can already see they've been negatively affected by Penguin 2.0 so clearly it didn't work for them.

On a related note, none of my Penguin 1.X affected sites recovered after Penguin 2.0.

[SEchecker]

no. tanked badly

[conroy]

No.

[johnApaul]

I used the disavow tool, I saw some keywords jump back, but they were weak. They ended up on page2.
I am trying to rank them now but don't seem to go anywhere

[newsnshop]

No. More than one month passed but no action.

[john28uk]

6 Weeks for me and no backlinks removed from Webmastertools, what is the average time people have had to wait?

[teokolo]

I'm using disavow since 6 weeks on 3 sites, no one recovered from a manual penalty.
In one of this websites (bad links cleanup almost complete) I see a decrease in backlinks, but most of them are still shown even if inside disavow file.

[renomart]

I used the disavow tool 4 months ago.

[n00b1]

@john28uk

Nofollow links are also listed in WMT. All Disavow does (supposedly) is force a nofollow tag onto links. You will still see them listed in WMT even if they have been 'disavowed'.

[luckystrike]

I have a great authority site but have been hit badly on April 24th 2012

I used the disavow tool to disavow links from bad neighborhoods months ago - mainly article links that used to work in the past - i even went as much as disavowing ezinearticles link. I really cleaned my link profile and since my site has been online since 2003 I have many natural links.

Did it work? No! It is really discouraging/depressing and this has left me without energy to work. Google is not what it used to be - it has grown into an unwelcome fiend that grabs and eats us on a whim. At the moment it has all of us confused which is what it probably wants.

[aristotle]

I haven't tried to get any backlinks removed but did submit disavow lists for two penguinized sites last october. This Penguin 2 rollout hasn't had any noticeable effect on the Google traffic to either site.

All of the negative reports in this thread suggest that penguin continues to penalize a site for certain keywords even after you remove or disavow the backlinks that contained the offending anchor text.

[diberry]

I did NOT do "disavow" because I hadn't built any links, and I am seeing indications of some small recovery today.

--I'm back in the top 30 positions for a number of long tail phrases that had fallen below that level after Penguin.

--After Penguin, some of my pages fell to between about 300-800. Now those pages are in the 50-150 range.

--And the page hit the hardest by Penguin is back in my sitelinks. I don't know how much to read into that, since I'm not sure if sitelinks mean much anymore, but it's definitely a change and it just happened today.

These changes don't seem to be improving my overall traffic volume from Google. I'm just sharing them in case they provide any clue to how Penguin works or what it's looking for.

[linkbuildr]

I've seen a site recently recover by removing as many links as they could and using the disavow tool for the rest. It took 5 months and 4 reconsideration requests before it was lifted. I'd say around 85% of their links were removed/disavowed. They haven't seen anywhere near the rankings they had, but it's onward and upwards at least.

[smithaa02]

^...but that almost seems like a manual penalty situation compared to penguin (which is automated). Reconsideration's don't work for Penguin (at least aren't supposed to). The trick is finding people who recovered by disavowing (or scrubbing) from Penguin, which I'm not sure exist.

Penguin 2.0 has to be a PR disaster for google. It basically says, if you honestly clean up your mistakes, we'll still punish you. But if used artificial back-linking schemes (as long as they are high quality), we'll reward you with great rankings.

Has anybody tried removing their disavows to see what would happen?

[spunkle]

it might be possible that Google has not used the data from the disavow tool yet as they might have wanted to run the penguin 2.0 update naturally first with out scewing the data from the disavow tool to observe the natural changes of penguin 2.0.

they might update the penguin also soon and use the data from the disavow tool then.

just a possibility.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

What pisses me off is Google creating all this work for webmasters with the implication that it will help when clearly it does nothing. They are making fools of us. I can just imagine them chortling away while reading this in the 'plex.

[SEchecker]

Disavow tool users = Not payed workers for G

G got all the data needed to make Penguin 2.0 (4)

OFC it does noting to your ranking as you lost all the spam links but G got a database of all link networks, blogs, directories and so on involved in spamming...

G should at least make an official statement and thank all the Webmasters for working free of charge!

This is ridiculous, G worked with tools of fear and disinformation to get data and free of charge working power from us!

[luckystrike]

but really when you think about it it all makes sense.

More random organic listings means that more businesses will be forced to bid for adwords driving revenue up. The effect is that adwords listings become more relevant than the organic listings. More clicks for google. Searchers will start giving adwords even more importance.

So to summarise:
- adwords demand rises by more businesses bidding
- more clicks from searchers looking for relevant results
- searchers start giving adwords more importance - in the past they used to turn a blind eye on them, now they will turn a blind eye on organic listings

What is amazing is that we are letting them get away with this. Class action suit against google?

[ColourOfSpring]

More random organic listings means that more businesses will be forced to bid for adwords driving revenue up. The effect is that adwords listings become more relevant than the organic listings. More clicks for google. Searchers will start giving adwords even more importance.

I argued for this theory in another thread a few months ago - some people here didn't like it. Thing is - quality of SERPs are down, quality of Adwords doesn't go down because of the nature of Adwords (bidding, advertisers caring about conversions and relevancy, Quality Score etc), Adwords revenue has sky-rocketed since Penguin 1.0, share price too. If I'm looking for something and I get more variety and relevance in the ads than I do in organics, I'm more likely to click on the ads.

But we must be wrong....we must be wrong.

[tedster]

Devil's advocate here:

Even though people have had this suspicion since the beginning of Adowrds, they still "could be" wrong. There are many possible explanations and some very large companies have collected big data sets to try to prove the Adwords idea. The proof has still not been found.

[diberry]

@Tedster, what form might the proof take? And what other possible explanations do you feel make the most sense?

@ColourOfSpring, I do think we should consider theories that end with "...and then Google makes more money" because that is indeed what they're doing. Not all of these theories will be correct or complete - maybe not even any of them. But what's needed is further investigation (as tedster suggests has already happened in this case), not outright dismissal.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

"Organizing the world's information to increase Google's bottom line."

[ColourOfSpring]

@ColourOfSpring, I do think we should consider theories that end with "...and then Google makes more money" because that is indeed what they're doing. Not all of these theories will be correct or complete - maybe not even any of them. But what's needed is further investigation (as tedster suggests has already happened in this case), not outright dismissal.

diberry, I'm all for alternate explanations, and I sincerely hope Google aren't simply driving more people to click on ads. IF there are alternate explanations (to the cynical theory), then it points to a more hopeful future for independent site owners. Just....I'd go with the Occam's razor explanation - Google's ad clicks, profits and share price have soared since Penguin 1.0. Even if this was an unintended consequence of Penguin 1.0 (!), it surely must have gotten the moneymen of Google rubbing their hands and thinking - "don't steer off this path whatever happens". Penguin 2.0 is more of the same. Sure, there's not been out-and-out carnage, but nobody (other than outliers) have recovered, brands are even more prominent.

As an aside, a guy at Google Ireland keeps on calling me about Google Products. In the UK, it's going paid-only after 30th June, and he's trying to get me and my clients to switch over. I get the feeling we (small business owners) are being "migrated" to the pay-per-click model.

We need an internet revolution just to survive....and if we don't survive, then a quiet revolution will come about - the Walmartisation of the internet. The internet will be (is?) a facsimile of the modern-day high street with big brands dominating. Then.....think of all of the millions of people employed in small business who go bust, or tighten their expenditure. How will that help Google? Analogy: something as tiny as a bee has a big impact on the environment. Get rid of bees and the flowers aren't pollinated and a whole chain reaction occurs that can devastate an environment. The same will happen if Google continue to dominate and drive traffic while cutting out the small business owner (the bee).

[tedster]

@Tedster, what form might the proof take? And what other possible explanations do you feel make the most sense?

At least one major (big data set) study that shows strong correlation between increased Adsense earnings or at least bid prices) and even one of the factors that people suggest are made to drive up Adsense income. Several companies I know that have access to big data sets have tried and not found it. If they ever succeed, it would be huge news, not something held quietly in the back rooms.

I do think we should consider theories that end with "...and then Google makes more money"

Absolutely - you've got to ask the question. The only problem with that is that Google almost always makes more money.