Disavow and recovery... is it possible?

[maccas]

Hi, has anyone managed to resurrect or know of a site that was hit by panda or penguin and found the cause was bad inbound links? I am trying with a 20 year old site that ranked for just about everything but over the last 5 years has gone from 1000's of visitors a day to a handful, if I am lucky. So far I have tried - complete redesign with a responsive template, blocked lots of low content pages (entire archived forum and photo gallery) so now I am left with only a few hundred pages with at least 4 paragraphs of what I would say is quality content. That was 6 months ago and nothing has changed. I just downloaded my links.csv file from console and I have so many backlinks that are spammy link farms and the like, 1000's of them. Before I begin this daunting task I would like to know if it is even worth it? Anyone noticed a difference in doing so? I really can't understand it all, I have one particular image that brought in a 1000 visitors a day on it's own, it has lots of links mostly from peoples personally blogs and small businesses as I allow the use of it with a link, practically all these sites rank above me in image search for this image and I am know where to be found. It is so frustrating.

[goodroi]

Can a website be recovered? Yes

Should a website be recovered? Too often - No. A website that was hit by penguin or panda was likely taking multiple shortcuts and probably has several issues needing to be addressed.

Yes, you can delete poor quality content pages but will there be enough quality pages left? The quality pages that are left are probably out of date & should be revised. Are you going to invest in new content for all of the keyword topics you are no longer covering after deleting the poor quality content? What about your content is better than the 100 other websites all covering the same exact topic? What makes you special?

As for links - yes you can disavow the spam links & manipulative link schemes but that just removes the poison. It doesn't make your link power strong again. You need to develop quality backlinks to replace all the lost link power that Google devalued from your site.

When you prune a plant, you still need to provide it with good sunshine, water, & fertilizer if you want it to thrive again. Same is true with a website. You can remove spammy links & poor content but you still need to add back in good links & good content otherwise it is very unlikely to resurrect the website. Not to mention the online marketing world has greatly changed and using tactics from a few years ago is unlikely to be good enough. Just in the last three years the game has really changed with https, page speed, schema, mobile first, and many other issues.

If you are on top of the current state of SEO you can resurrect a site. Too many sites aren't worth the effort & it can be much easier to just start fresh. Each situation is different. Good luck.

[maccas]

Thanks, just used one of those webmaster tools and says I have a spam score of 28%, how accurate that is and how it actually relates to Google I have no idea but it must mean something? I just spent half an hour browsing random sites within my niche and no one is even close to that level. I also don't have https as even though I disappeared out of the search result I was still pulling in plenty of image searches so didn't want to touch the site. Disavow, https and hope.

[pavanear]

Thanks for sharing a valuable information

[maccas]

Ok, disavowed 250 domains, will leave it for 3 months and see if any change and will post the results. So many "yes it helps", "no it does help" online. If anyone wants my site URL for curiosity reasons you message me (hope this is allowed). I am not going to make any other changes as I would like to know if this tool has any effect at all. In 3 months I will add https.

[maccas]

Crazy how one site ranks and another doesn't, I have a newish site, well been online bout 6 years but was just a page of links to a type of school in my regions. 4 years ago I made a drupal site and allowed schools to add their information, now out of the blue it ranks 3 in the results for the main search if looking for this particular kind of school, half result page are of course ads, carousels and google map of schools. Never the less it is ranking above practically all the actual school sites and some of these are big international companies with large facebook followings and the like. I have like 2 links to the site and a few spam links.

[tangor]

Disavow was an information gathering experiment by g that indicated "direction" for their staff to "work on the algo". Lasted about 3 years. These days not so much. Those who did NOTHING in that regard weren't hurt as g "learned" what was bad and took it from there.

Does Disavow help these days? Possibly. Is it bankable for your effort? Marginal. Play the game and see what happens, but have LOW expectations for any positive result. There are too many horror stories out there that indicate odds are 40-60 for any benefit.

After all, you cannot control who LINKS to you!