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Should I disavow my own sites ?

         

endomorph1

6:09 pm on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have tried searching for ages on this but I cannot find anything.

We have multiple language sites for our company.

The UK has product pages, but the foreign websites do not (for not wanting to translate 5000+ product descriptions into 8 languages) so the search results lead back to the UK product pages.

We obviously have a huge amount of links from our foreign sites back to our UK site. The links are on images so do not have anchor text.

My questions are -

1. Should I "nofollow" the links on the foreign pages ?
2. Should I submit the URL's of the foreign websites to Google disavow or would that hurt myself ?

Thanks

Robert Charlton

6:33 pm on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



endomorph1 - Without knowing more details (like what other inbound links you have), if I retained your current product page setup, I would probably nofollow the links on the foreign pages. I'm not a big fan of using internal nofollows, but I think that would be the cleanest way to do things.

You certainly don't want to disavow your own navigation.

Normally, Google allows a reasonable amount of cross-linking on one's own site, but with multiple language sites and 5000+ product pages all cross-linked, I can see Matt Cutts raising his eyebrows. Most likely, that much cross-linking would look like a "link scheme" to Google.

Regarding the question of whether the disavow would be hurting your own sites, it's noted in this thread that Google has said that disavow won't hurt friendly sites....

Best practices for using the Google disavow tool, confirmed
Feb 3, 2013
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4542078.htm [webmasterworld.com]

"Do not worry about damaging other people, that does not happen"

That said, I think disavowing your own pages would unnecessarily complicate things... and possibly Google might not figure it out. To use a bad analogy, but one that comes to mind... it's something like trying to correct incorrect internal nav urls by using canonical link tags. It really doesn't make sense to do it that way.

Perhaps someone can suggest an approach that wouldn't create the PageRank black holes that internal nofollows would create, but which would prevent the appearance of a network of sites for the purposes of pushing link juice.

A far better alternative approach, IMO, would be to build product pages for each site, in the appropriate languages. As these would be in different languages, they wouldn't be seen as dupe content... and each site could be assessed by Google on its own merits.

endomorph1

6:41 pm on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the reply and you have said what I thought.

I just wasnt 100% sure on disavowing myself - better to err on the side of caution ?

I think the "Do not worry about damaging other people, that does not happen" relates to another matter which I read earlier in that if you submit a disavow link for site A that links to yours (say site B), then it would not hurt a link to site C.

But what I don't want to do is send 7 disavow reports to G each with a whole host of links of our own sites, and then penalising those sites because G thinks "Well I have had 5000 requests for site x, they must be bad !"

We have pretty much nofollowed all cross links with the exception of one on the home page.

JD_Toims

6:46 pm on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Personally, I think the most visitor friendly, safest, least "manipulative" way is to "go the other way", meaning "pull" the descriptions into the language variations via AJAX rather than bothering to send people somewhere else when you could just put the info they would find right in front of them.

I just wasnt 100% sure on disavowing myself - better to err on the side of caution ?

No -- You should only use a disavow file when you *can't do anything else*. Since you're in control of all the links, you *can* nofollow or remove them, so there's no point or reason to disavow them -- What disavowing does is allows you to essentially nofollow links on other sites you don't have control of and cannot get the webmaster to change. The links you're talking about are your links, so you don't need to nofollow "remotely" at all.

heisje

12:44 am on Nov 9, 2013 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Should I disavow my own sites ?

Have they brought us to this level of hysteria?

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