Keyword tanked after disavowing it

elarbolverde

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My website is ranking for 3 out of 4 keywords I have been optimizing for a long time. The fourth keyword used to be ranking decently (top 12 of results) up until I decided to disavow a couple of hundred backlinks containing that keyword, because I thought they were low quality. Since I disavowed these backlinks using GSC, this specific keyword tanked on the search results, it now bounces between the 6th and 7th page on Google, and no matter how many good quality backlinks I point at it, it doesn't move past the 6th page of results.
Any words of wisdom are highly appreciated.
 
Maybe you disavowed too much. Occasionally, it's difficult to disavow correctly. Unless you have been attacked by a negative SEO, you have a GSC exported copy of your current links and you do a diff with the new profile to see which links are part of such attack, I would no do a disavow (unless you take a good analysis of each single link to see how good or bad it is with good knowledge of what you are doing).

The fact that just 1 keyword tanked is somewhat good. All 4 keywords could have tanked for such action.

Generally the recommendation is not to disavow at all even on attack
 
Only ever look into disavowing if your site gets hit or loses rankings. Google is already discounting the obvious spam. Every site gets spammy links naturally. Well, lesson learned then. Good luck!
 
Only ever look into disavowing if your site gets hit or loses rankings. Google is already discounting the obvious spam. Every site gets spammy links naturally. Well, lesson learned then. Good luck!
Still don't.
 
that's what it's for, I think you need an education in SEO because I keep seeing you peddling GSA links as tier1 lol and asking people not to disavow spam post site hit.
That's not what it's for buddy, but you keep thinking that. I can tell you the last thing you want to do is disavow especially if your already losing rankings. You should only disavow when you get any negative seo attacks on your website, that's about it. Like mass porn backlinks to your website. That would likely want to be disavowed.
 
Maybe you disavowed too much. Occasionally, it's difficult to disavow correctly. Unless you have been attacked by a negative SEO, you have a GSC exported copy of your current links and you do a diff with the new profile to see which links are part of such attack, I would no do a disavow (unless you take a good analysis of each single link to see how good or bad it is with good knowledge of what you are doing).

The fact that just 1 keyword tanked is somewhat good. All 4 keywords could have tanked for such action.

Generally the recommendation is not to disavow at all even on attack
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Is there a way to fix this, perhaps cancelling the disavow? Or would that make matters even worse?
In google support it mentions this, buy I don't know if I should trust it:

---> Remove all disavowals for a property


If you want to remove all disavowals for a given property, follow these steps. If you want to replace an old list with a new one, you do not need to do this; simply upload the new list.


  1. Go to the disavow links tool page.
  2. Select a property from the property list.
  3. Click Cancel Disavowals. The disavowal list for the selected property will be removed. It can take a few weeks for Google to incorporate your list into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see.
 
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While I was never a fan of disavowing links, I would suggest waiting 3-4 weeks after disavowing before you delete the disavow file to see if the rankings come back.
 
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