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.

[Bones]

Almost 2 months now from Penguin 2.0.

Can anyone find evidence from any case studies,from any source on recoveries using the disavow tool, not involving a manual penalty. ie purely algorithmic ?

Nearly three months, isn't it?

If I understand the way it works correctly, there will be no recovery stories yet, as far as Penguin 2 goes at least as the algo hasn't been re-run.

1. Remove as many links as possible, disavow remaining links.
2. Wait for those pages to be re-crawled.
3. Possibly see a further drop in rankings as links are taken out of the 'link graph'.
4. Wait for the Penguin algo to be re-run.
5. Penalty lifted/not lifted if site is deemed to have a clean enough profile.
6. Even if lifted, site probably won't recover to previous rankings as no longer benefitting from removed/disavowed links.

I'm guessing the algo will update every six months or so to serve as punishment to webmasters (and anyone searching for relevant but Penguinized pages/sites using Google).

[Whitey]

Nearly three months, isn't it?

My bad :) Time flies.

[MasterOfPuppets]

<moved from another location>

Did you see any case that helped ranking improve after using disavow tool ?

I have tried many things. Using noindex tag at thin pages. Better description keyword etc etc

My next planning is disavowing entire backlink domain list which page rank below 4

I will download whole list from webmaster tools and majestic seo

But i wonder are there any case which improved rankings ever

I don't have any manual penalty

My site is not like blog, or newsletter or etc

It is a <snip> site

[edited by: aakk9999 at 8:50 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2013]
[edit reason] Charter, no niche naming please [/edit]

[np2003]

Case 1) Had a site that was penalized. Disavowed a bunch of domains, opened reconsideration request. Manual penalty removed. Two months on, the domain gets even less traffic than before.

Case 2) Domain is penalized. Sent in a huge disavow file. Site falls further in rankings and is still penalized.

If I was a webmaster I would just ignore the disavow tool completely. It's useless.

I wonder how the people who work behind webspam/serps team can sleep at night. They have probably ruined hundreds of thousands/millions of mom and pop/small businesses over night, all for what? To please the 1% who hold Google stock. The people they want to target, e.g. "spammers" are still winning.

[aristotle]

Case 1) Had a site that was penalized. Disavowed a bunch of domains, opened reconsideration request. Manual penalty removed. Two months on, the domain gets even less traffic than before.

Case 2) Domain is penalized. Sent in a huge disavow file. Site falls further in rankings and is still penalized.

Your sites' earlier rankings (before the penalties) were probably being boosted by some of the backlinks that you later disavowed. So after you disavowed them, your sites lost that boost and therefore can't rank as high as before, even if the penalty is lifted. In other words, your current lower rankings are the logical outcome of the disavow process.

If you want to regain your pre-penalty rankings, your sites will need to attract some new natural backlinks to resupply the boost that was lost by the disavowels.

[Awarn]

What happens when you delete the disavow file? Are those domains still disavowed or do they come back as links?

[itsjustme2]

Your sites' earlier rankings (before the penalties) were probably being boosted by some of the backlinks that you later disavowed. So after you disavowed them, your sites lost that boost and therefore can't rank as high as before, even if the penalty is lifted. In other words, your current lower rankings are the logical outcome of the disavow process.

If you want to regain your pre-penalty rankings, your sites will need to attract some new natural backlinks to resupply the boost that was lost by the disavowels.

Acquiring additional backlinks might be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for explaining the poor post-penalty performance of the site. I don't know enough about the site to make the call.

Of course backlinks matter, but consider sites with healthy, natural backlink profile that got hit with a non-manual penalty and used the dusavow tool.

Comparative research in my niche showed me that three sites on a page one of a serp had very few links. One site had a total of three domains linking to it and sixty total links.

I'd still have thousands of natural links (0ver twelve years) after disavowing ten thousand scrapper links.

Yet for a non-manual penalty site, with a strong, natural backlink profile, nothing.

science works by replication. If even one site in my position, a non-manual penalty site that used the disavow tool to clean up their link profile succeeded, then others should have been able to replicate that result.

As of today, I've yet to find any evidence here on the forum that a non-manual penalty site succeeded with the disavow tool.

Considering that this forum hosts some of the world's best webmasters, with 20 years experience as software engineers, it's more than reasonable to assume they can read algos with some sufficiency and solve a problem.

However, after one year, there's no evidence that the tool works for the class of sites that have non-manual penalties. There's no evidence that any anecdotal story of success can be replicated.

given the facts, it sounds more than reasonable to hypothesis that the disavow tool does not work for non-manual penalty sites.

Pardon the current headline pun, but it comes across, at least to me, that Google is trying to sell webmaster's the proverbial "bridge in New York" or "swampland in Florida" with their promotion of the disavow tool.

[aristotle]

itsjustme2
Isn't it possible that some other factor besides backllinks could have caused your penalty? For example, maybe the internal linking structure is "over-optimized" in some way. If so, cleaning up the backlinks wouldn't help at all.

As for using the disavow tool to recover, there have been scattered reports where it did appear to work. In fact, I have a small site of my own that apparently recovered from Penguin by my using nothing but the disavow tool. This site was hit by the initial Penguin roll-out in April 2012. I was convinced that it was caused by some links from free directories that I submitted to in 2006 and 2007. Some of these directories later changed from free to pay, so it might appear that I had paid for the links, even though I didn't. In any case, I compiled a disavow list of those directory domains and submitted it. Later I discovered that I had missed some, and submitted a longer list.

The site appeared to fully recover during an announced Penguin update in October 2013, when its Google rankings suddenly improved and traffic surged, then stabalized at a much higher level. The site hasn't completely regained all of the lost traffic, but this would be expected since it no longer gets a boost from the directory links which were disavowed. (Apparently those directory links had provided only a small boost, but enough to notice, since the site regained most of the lost traffic but not all).

I didn't try to get any backlinks removed, but only used the disavow tool. I also haven't tried to build any new backlinks.

Of course as you suggested, there are still many algorithmically-penalized sites that haven't recovered through the use of the disavow tool. But you shouldn't jump to the conclusion that it isn't possible.

[aakk9999]

What happens when you delete the disavow file? Are those domains still disavowed or do they come back as links?

I believe they come back as links. Disavow file shows the current status. So if it was there and now is not, then nothing is being disavowed.

What we do not know is how quickly will Google re-process the lack of disavow file.

[Awarn]

@aakk9999

That is basically what I think as well. That is one of the issues I am seeing more and more. There is such a great amount of vagueness anymore. We can't tell if the disavow even works and the mechanics of the workings.

It would be nice if we knew more. So many of us can't definitively say why we are penalized. Is it over-optimized, links, spam, pagination, duplicate content, negative seo etc and there is no help. I get furious when Google calls me anymore trying to tweak my Adwords account. Seems like every month it is a new person trying to sell me on how they are there to assist me.

Google seems to think business is one sided. They want me to listen to all their sales pitches but in no way do they want to listen to any of my concerns. One sided relationships never last. Google will find this out the hard way.

[itsjustme2]

itsjustme2
Isn't it possible that some other factor besides backllinks could have caused your penalty? For example, maybe the internal linking structure is "over-optimized" in some way. If so, cleaning up the backlinks wouldn't help at all.

hard to say...the penalty has been applied for three years, since Panda.

I rewrote the entire site over two years (450-800 words/page, along with original pictures and over 200 original videos)

I 301d the non-upaded pages to the new page or a related page, rather than the home page. I left old links that did not match up with a rewritten page to remain a 404, rather than 301 them to a home page.

I did very minimal new link building, only requesting links from the "bigs" in my niche, and did one guest post with a well respected site,

I just checked pinterest and their unpaid minions have pinned (or stolen 25%) of my site, without my permission. And no, pinterest sends me no traffic and their so-called social effect is non-existent)

in any event, the pinterest interest tells me my site is very relevant and interesting to users, as long as the site is up on pinterest.

It's html5, so I do not have traditional breadcrubmb navigation, however, I do have a "linkbox" or table with "additional information" linked to the category.

with some 30 categories and approximately 25 pages or articles/category, each article does link back to the home page category. That does not come across as overoptimiation.
merely an html5 revision of the basic php based breadcrumbs.

since I never participated in article sites or squido gnerated links, there's absolutley no duplicated content on the net except for the scrapers and the pinterest doubles.

The long renumeration is meant to demonstrate my attention to all the smallest of detains to my site as possible.

I also do not doubt your story of your site recovery after using the disavow tool. It's just that if it worked, we would hear more anecdotal stories that could be verified. I'm on my third version of the disavow tool since last May, with no change. Now I'm working on the mostly ten thousand Chinese sites that I have not idea why they are there.

Three years ago I noticed in WMT that my most linked keyword was a keyword in Chinese characters.

The next five were your basic non-pattern inks

site.com
site name
visit

so, there's not evidence of keyword stuffing or keyoword overoptimiation there...because I never did it, or maybe with twenty of the couple thousand natural links I received over twelve years I requested exact keyword anchor tags.

After all these "tweaks" following every Google rule, and seeing how sites that make the first two pages of my niche for various keywords break the rules I'm suppose to follow, it does come across that these rules are not all that big a deal in the algo....

leading me to beleive, it's the backlinks of scrappers and Chinese sites ) although I've heard other people have problems with the Russian domains and Ukranian domains based on negative seo practices.

I'm in the same boat as perhaps 80% of all Penguina penalty sites, as I read the current stats...no matter what I've done to improve the site

[aristotle]

hard to say...the penalty has been applied for three years, since Panda.

In that case, I don't understand why you think Penguin is the culprit for your site's problems. The initial Penguin rollout took place on April 25, 2012, less than two years ago. That's how I know that my small site was hit by Penguin, because that's the day when its Google rankings and traffic took a big drop. And its later recovery also took placed on the day of an announced Penguin refresh.

I don't have the exact dates of most of the announced Penguin rollouts in my memory, but you can look them up and see if they match with your site's big rankings movements. If they don't match up, then in my opinion Penguin isn't your problem.

[itsjustme2]

In that case, I don't understand why you think Penguin is the culprit for your site's problems. The initial Penguin roll out took place on April 25, 2012, less than two years ago. That's how I know that my small site was hit by Penguin, because that's the day when its Google rankings and traffic took a big drop. And its later recovery also took placed on the day of an announced Penguin refresh.

Perhaps I was not clear. I first started losing traffic with Panda. In the subsequent updates, Penguin,
son of Penguin, etc. I lost 50% more traffic, for a three year total of 98% traffic loss. Each time I "improved"
my site, I lost traffic. so, my consistent traffic loss does look update related.

OTOH, the poster girl for Penguin recovery, Dani'sweb, reports on a "ghost update", that Google refuses to acknowledge
and nonetheless clobbered the site.

Being formally trained in philosophy, I am reminded that the relational integrity of the logician's enterprise
requires me to accept Google's rules as valid representations of their policy on serp placement.

Nonetheless, the logician's enterprise also reminds me that alternative explanations, in additional to Google's
formal statements also contain validity, and perhaps soundness, the other requirement for good argument.

For example, William of Ockham criticized medieval philosophy for it's use of incorporeal substances in logic, or, as
Dani's web puts it, having a an algo ontology that contains "ghosts" or non-corporeal substances.

Ockham pointed out this problem, as a paradox of entitlement, I mean entailment.

If one accepts the premise as true (and the first rule of logic is that charity requires us to accept a premise as true)
, by definition the conclusion must be true, or the conclusion is entailed by the premise.

Google is entitled to state any premise or rules of their road, and by definition, the logician must accept their argument as
valid.

I accepted their argument as valid for three years.

Ockham pointed out that the problem, or the paradox of entailment caused some logic nightmares.

[alexanderpruss.blogspot.com...]

you could for example, create a valid argument along the lines,
you are a donkey therefore you are a god...
interpret it anyway you want...google is a jac3a^^, therefore google is a god to other google jacka%%es

BTW...Ockham got excommunicated (panda-ed and penguin-ed) for his critique of medieval logic. leading to the conclusion that the sum of logic (his book) consists of
"beware who you call a donkey" (philosophy joke)

[MrPerfect]

We can rank inner page URL by creating new inner page in penalized domain. Google penalized only our main domain name not entire domain URL's :)