Test for effect of disavowing links

[Ian J]

Last October / November I disavowed a bunch of links relating to a link exchange scheme that I was involved in 12 to 15 years earlier and my site slowly rose up the rankings from the bottom of page 2 and top of page 3 to a glorious 8th on page one for that all important keyword "factoring" in January this year.

Earlier this year we had the problem of the Russian website spewing loads of unwanted signature links which I disavowed at the time. I have no idea whether these links have any effect on my site ranking but it steadily slipped down to it's current level on about page 20 where it has been for the last three months which is obviously no good to man nor beast.

I have today removed the list of 448 links that I had previously disavowed and will be interested to see whether it has any effect.

Basically I have created this thread so that I can look back in a couple of months and see what's what as I have a truly terrible memory and won't remember where I've made notes but will remember that I made a thread here

 

[justinaldridge]

Interesting. I am seeing mixed results with disavowing.

A client of ours tanked badly after they had their domain spammed by competitors. We disavowed and it came back..within about a week.

Our own site has the Russian spam links from the UKBF issue. Last year it seemed to drop in rankings because of it but I left it. A couple of months later it recovered on its own and ended up ranking better than ever!

Another client, we recently disavowed a big chunk of his spam backlinks (he pushed us to do it, against my advice) and it had zero effect. That was over a month ago.

So...mixed results!

 

[Ian J]

Just checked this morning and it ranks at 139 which is right at the bottom of page 13 so after 17 days there has been no movement

 

[Ian J]

According to Serpfox it has moved up 48 places overnight and is now in 84th position. Let's hope that this is the start of a new beginning

 

[Ian J]

According to Serpfox it has moved up 48 places overnight and is now in 84th position. Let's hope that this is the start of a new beginning

I've just had a closer look and it isn't the home page ranking at all but one of my filler pages
https://www.factoringsolutions.co.uk/factoring-definitions/

Most odd

 

[justinaldridge]

Was it the home page ranking before?

 

[Ian J]

Was it the home page ranking before?

Yes. It has been the home page ranking for the last 16 years until it bombed earlier this year

 

[justinaldridge]

Ranking issues tend to be very query specific these days. I would assume for your search term that your home page has tripped a filter (e.g., over-optimisation) and that's why an internal page is being picked up instead. You can try deoptimising the internal page completely for the search term and see if Google once again picks up the home page and then see what ranking position is pops back in at. That's a good test to understand query specific ranking issues.

 

[BusinessTradeCentre]

You would of thought a domain name 16 years old would have some authority and those links shouldn't of made a difference.

 

[justinaldridge]

Domain age is irrelevant. Domain trust....that's what matters.

 

[BusinessTradeCentre]

Domain age is irrelevant. Domain trust....that's what matters.

I wouldn't say its irrelevant, it does have some impact. doesn't trust come with age?

 

[justinaldridge]

It is irrelevant. Domain age has never been a ranking factor. Obviously older domains, if they haven't been spammed, have had more time to build up some trust with Google, but it's not an age thing.

I put a new site live last year and it outranks websites that have been around for years. Why? Because mine is much better.

Don't confuse age with trust/authority.

 

[webgeek]

Then again, sites dealing with business finance are starting to hit those more robust sets of quality scoring as well.

I tend to think @justinaldridge has hit this one on the head. Over-optimisation surely would be a suspect (along with a few other quality score ingredients being missing/weak).