Disavowing spam domains

Hey guys,

Here is a thing, some spammers created a few thousand spammy backlinks to my money page around a year ago and they used exact match keywords on most of the links to kill my anchor ratio. The spam links have been going since mid May 2020 and around 6 months after. Here is the result, the page continuously lost in traffic due to the attack



These spam links are mostly nofollow but around 10% of them are d0follow.
I want to recover from it and the best thing that comes to mind is to disavow all the spammy domains. So I have a few questions regarding GSC disavow tool:

1) When a domain disavowed, are the links from it still count in anchor ratio?
For example, I have 1k nofollow links with an exact match anchor that kills my anchor ratio. Does disavowing these nofollow links (domains) make them not count in anchor ratio anymore?

2) Does disavowing a domain equal to making all the links from the domain as 'nofollow'?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that by disavowing a domain I basically make all links from it 'nofollow'. But it leads to the next question.

3) Does nofollow link anchor text count towards anchor ratio?

I'm asking most of the questions about anchors because I believe that the attack killed my money page because of the anchor ratio. I know there might be other factors, but I feel that it might be the core issue.

Please advice

curious_ said:

1) When a domain disavowed, are the links from it still count in anchor ratio?

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I don't really think so

curious_ said:

2) Does disavowing a domain equal to making all the links from the domain as 'nofollow'?

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not really, a noffolow link will be counted for its anchor unlike a disavowed one,
what I can confirm is a powerful link will have more weight for anchor rather than a weaker one,
so a ******** links should have more influence in this logically as it's usually much more powerful (not really tested tho)

curious_ said:

3) Does nofollow link anchor text count towards anchor ratio?

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Yes it does

@hideath thank you!

Any other opinions guys?

sure you are not hit by Nov / Dec core update?

Sima Simmer said:

sure you are not hit by Nov / Dec core update?

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Great question! Other similar pages that were not attacked didn't drop.

for me it looks like you have the typical spike before the core update following a total rank loss - about those links, I mean if it's 1 year ago stuff doesn't begin to drop 6 months after those links were built - if those links come from low-quality foreign domains (backlinks) you can disavow anyways (might not change anything) - but for me, it looks like you were hit by that core update end of last year. I never saw a site went up by disavowing links - I would only use it with a manual penalty or someone is really trying hard to kill you - but creating 20 backlinks with exact anchors won't break anything in rankings. That would be too easy. You can PM me your site I can take a quick look- no problem.

Sima Simmer said:

sure you are not hit by Nov / Dec core update?

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@curious_ - above is your answer, not those links. I am 80% sure of it. if so called negative seo worked, then everyone and their mother would be doing it.

Sima Simmer said:

for me it looks like you have the typical spike before the core update following a total rank loss - about those links, I mean if it's 1 year ago stuff doesn't begin to drop 6 months after those links were built - if those links come from low-quality foreign domains (backlinks) you can disavow anyways (might not change anything) - but for me, it looks like you were hit by that core update end of last year. I never saw a site went up by disavowing links - I would only use it with a manual penalty or someone is really trying hard to kill you - but creating 20 backlinks with exact anchors won't break anything in rankings. That would be too easy. You can PM me your site I can take a quick look- no problem.

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Everything you say sounds correct.

But I think you underestimate the magnitude of the spam attack. We are not talking about 20 backlinks, we are talking about a few thousand backlinks. Look at the numbers of anchors for the first 3 positions, these are my top 3 keywords they used as anchors:

curious_ said:

Everything you say sounds correct.

But I think you underestimate the magnitude of the spam attack. We are not talking about 20 backlinks, we are talking about a few thousand backlinks. Look at the numbers of anchors for the first 3 positions, these are my top 3 keywords they used as anchors:View attachment 170107

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above data is not from GSC. I am pretty sure that majority of the domains listed in above data set, are not shown in GSC; which most likely are being ignored by big G.

please confirm.

fb3003 said:

above data is not from GSC. I am pretty sure that majority of the domains listed in above data set, are not shown in GSC; which most likely are being ignored by big G.

please confirm.

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Most of them are in GSC I've been checking for an hour now and lots of them are there. So I uploaded a new disavow.

On a separate note, one of my other lead gen URLs was attacked as well, but that one based on мedium.com Which means I can't just go to GSC and disavow all the links. So I hired some indian guys to rebalance my anchor ratio with some naked links, 'here', 'see more', 'read more', domain name and other anchors. I'm hoping that this will help to get the page back to good performance in search.