Quick Question Regarding No-Follow Links and Disavowing

Greetings everyone.

During this Google Update, one of my keywords got struck and disappeared from the SERP. I was ranking #1 for a whole year for the same keyword.

I'm still ranking for other related and non-related keywords on my site but that was one of the primary keywords and I lost it.

I thought it's just because of the Google update and the rankings will recover as they always do after updates.

But, I've seen no recovery, and my site is totally gone from the SERP for that keyword.

I checked my backlink status to see if anything was wrong and I found ~40 backlinks made for my site within one week. And I did not make any of them.

Most of them are no-follow and come from sites with 0 authority. Around 80-90% of them are directory sites and domain lists.

My question is, Is there any chance that my site is getting affected with these No-follow links, Should I disavow them asap?

While I can't give you a certain answer, I personally do not believe that those links are affecting you poorly, especially if they are nofollowed.

Did they get built on or around the time your site lost its ranking for that 1 keyword?

Nope no follow links don’t effect your rankings

Sweely said:

While I can't give you a certain answer, I personally do not believe that those links are affecting you poorly, especially if they are nofollowed.

Did they get built on or around the time your site lost its ranking for that 1 keyword?

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The site lost its rank during the update on 6th of May. I thought that the site will recover automatically as it did in the previous updates.
But, I do not see any change till now in the rankings. Keywords that were lost are not recovering at all.
And now this backlink issue, I had a hunch maybe these links are affecting me or preventing the site from recovering.

Mr Positive said:

Nope no follow links don’t effect your rankings

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Thanks for the info. Would you mind sharing any recovery methods that you know to get through this update. I lost 75% of my traffic and it's not coming back

Deepesh Sharma said:

The site lost its rank during the update on 6th of May. I thought that the site will recover automatically as it did in the previous updates.
But, I do not see any change till now in the rankings. Keywords that were lost are not recovering at all.
And now this backlink issue, I had a hunch maybe these links are affecting me or preventing the site from recovering.

Click to expand...

Correlation does not imply causation in SEO, I'm sure you know this already

Sounds like you were hit by the update like a lot of other people.

While it's good that you've started to dig into why you might have lost your rankings - I think you need to start your search in another end.

What could it be if it wasn't for those links? There's some good threads here on BHW about the latest update and what it might have been caused by.

Sweely said:

Correlation does not imply causation in SEO, I'm sure you know this already

Sounds like you were hit by the update like a lot of other people.

While it's good that you've started to dig into why you might have lost your rankings - I think you need to change the possible scenario.

What could it be if it wasn't for those links? There's some good threads here on BHW about the latest update and what it might have been caused by.

Click to expand...

Thanks Sweely

Yeah you're right. I'll check other threads related to the update.