Disavow Tool Advice Needed

[0_00_0]

Ok so I am thinking of trying out the new Disavow tool on a couple of my penguin-affected websites. I have an enormous amount of crap backlinks that I built pre-penguin using Xrumer and scrapebox direct to my websites that need to go. I have a few questions before I start removing links though.

Here are my questions:
What is the best way to gather my backlinks? Should I be using webmaster tools? I unfortunately don't have a premium ahrefs or seomoz (opensiteexplorer) account. I tried using scrapebox to scrape my backlinks but I didn't have much luck.

How should I determine what is a "bad" link? I will probably be using scrapebox or whatever other software you guys recommend to get this data. I assume i should look at the page's PR (not domain), number of outbound links and maybe number of inbound links?

I don't think my websites got manually reviewed I was just hit by the algo. This tool isn't just for manual reviews is it?

Has anyone had success using it? I just want to try it on a few of my websites and I'll happily post my results. I hear it takes about a month for big G to take the disavowed links into consideration is this true?

Thank you so much for your help!

 

[jeromespitfire]

To get a list of your current bad backlinks, gather together any old scrapebox and xrumer lists you have, and run them through Scrapebox check links, or Xrumer's database analyse with your domain, to see which links are still alive. Add all of them to your list. Then, go buy a full ahrefs report from fiverr, and seperate them out by entering some spammy footprints in the urls (such as "profile.php"). Maybe don't submit them all, maybe keep some the high PR links.

After submitting wait a few weeks, and submit a reconsideration request, explaining how you have submitted some bad links using the disavow tool. I told them that another SEO company built these "bad" links and now I am trying to remove them.

This is the approach I have just used for one of my client's sites, I am yet to see improvements yet though.

Anyone else have any experience with the disavow tool?

 

[navimeister]

This is how I have done it. Head over to Cognitive SEO and opt for the free trial. It lets you use full functionality. They gather their data from multiple sources and then recrawl all of your links to see if they are still online and what kind of links they are. You can export to CSV and group/filter by Pagerank, Page Authority, etc... It's the best tool in my opinion for this kind of work. Good luck!

 

[jeromespitfire]

This is how I have done it. Head over to Cognitive SEO and opt for the free trial. It lets you use full functionality. They gather their data from multiple sources and then recrawl all of your links to see if they are still online and what kind of links they are. You can export to CSV and group/filter by Pagerank, Page Authority, etc... It's the best tool in my opinion for this kind of work. Good luck!

Have you had any success submitting links to disavow then?

 

[0_00_0]

Thanks for the responses! I guess I can round up some of the xrumer and scrapebox lists. That's a good place to start. I think I will keep everything with PR>=0 && OBL < 25 just to start to see if there is any improvement. I will also need a way to filter the profile links.

I will also give the cognitive seo thing a try I've never tried it though. Hopefully it compares to ahrefs and open site. The pricing plans seem much more reasonable too.

I am also wondering about the reconsideration request - is this necessary? I didn't get manually reviewed I just got hit by the algo.

It's too bad that you haven't seen results jeromespitfire. How long has it been since you submitted your list?

Also, one more question - do we need to add comments to the bad links file? I've seen everywhere that Google wants you to add comments saying things like "attempted to remove link" but I think that would be ridiculousness with the number of links I need to remove.

I really appreciate the input guys!

 

[davids355]

You can get all your links from ahrefs - If you PM me ill send you a full report.

If you built your own links then you could go through them and change the anchors to generic terms, but if that's not practical then you need to make efforts to remove them all - not the link, method of contact, date and response for all links, then send that to google - tell them you hired a promotions company (that's what I said, to pretend like I didn't even know what "SEO" was

If this is too time consuming, linkdelete.com will do it all for you.

Regarding success, I am starting to see success after about 3-4 months of work - but as google say, you need to submit a rein liaison request AS WELL AS using the disavow tool - I did both, removed about 5k links: mission.

Regarding quality, if you use ahrefs they give you quality score, as do linkdelete.com.
But also, you can use your head - high obl low content pages look bad, any paterns between your links look bad - for example, a lot of the links I removed were on hundreds of different sites, but ALL had the same few links and same few anchors on every page - to me that's just a big fat footprint

Good luck anyway.

 

[ok180]

After using the disavow tool almost a month ago my rankings only seemed to get worse. I was already on page 50 for most of my big terms anyway but after using it most fell to the last few pages of results on pages 80+. Im hoping when they run penguin again I might see some return as my site is affected by an algorithmic penalty and not manual action according to the reconsideration requests I submitted.

 

[davids355]

After using the disavow tool almost a month ago my rankings only seemed to get worse. I was already on page 50 for most of my big terms anyway but after using it most fell to the last few pages of results on pages 80+. Im hoping when they run penguin again I might see some return as my site is affected by an algorithmic penalty and not manual action according to the reconsideration requests I submitted.

Less than a month is not long enough to tell IMHO.