In a recent video Christoph Cemper from Link Research Tools answered the question: Does disavowing URLs work? The answer in short is yes, but it can take time…
Getting your manual penguin penalty lifted is a fantastic thing, but does that mean you get your rankings back? In most cases it does not, however there is a reason for this which was noted in a video made by Christoph Cemper in November 2013. The following is taken from what Christoph said in the webinar.
Link Detox Boost – How to get rid of a Google Penalty in 3 days
“We have to understand that Google is just a machine, it is just like a computer. In reality it is a hyper complex, hyper large computer system that is programmed by humans and uses algorithms, data based algorithms, but at the end of the day it is just a machine. Google is a corporation, maybe the largest corporation in the world but it is not God. The problem we often hear in forums and blogs is that disavow does not work. In the comments of the Matt Cutts videos there is always people saying this and this goes for some of the bigger search engine blogs such as Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.
The actual truth is that disavow does work but it takes ages. It can take weeks or even months for the disavow to become effective. You may have seen the notice when you upload a disavow file where it says,
“it may take some time for Google to process the information you have uploaded. In particular this information will be incorporated into our indexes as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see, which can take a number of weeks.”
They also say that these links will continue to be shown in the Webmaster tools inbound links section, but be careful with this because they normally only show about 20% of the inbound links.
The problem here is that Google is just Google and although they have millions of crawling bots there are trillions, even hexatrillions of websites, so resources are limited. Google sees links that cause the penguin filter to trip and cause manual spam actions as low quality links. As you would expect low quality links will get crawled slowly. If you could buy a link on the BBC homepage you can bet that they recrawl that every five seconds, but years of dirty work in SEO now show their effect. An example of the problem is something like a forum profile link on some sub page of a long abandoned forum, or maybe a link directory that nobody uses any more. These are very low quality links and consequently they will get crawled very infrequently.
The problem is that Google bot is lazy when it comes to crawling your poor links. Google bot is very active on very high quality sites and high authority sites, but the low quality links were not crawled well in the first place and these links don’t work until the Google bot comes around. So the idea is to push the Google bot. Link research tools had their experience for years when they were building links and pushing Google bot is the solution. Google bot needs to crawl the web and needs to recall the URLs on your disavow file. But how can we push the Google bot to go faster? Well it seems that link research tools have built a new tool using technology that they had in 2007 and come up with a new tool called link detox boost.
Link detox boost as a simple but very powerful effect. It triggers the recrawl of the toxic links, this apparently is not about indexing. What happens is that the Google bot comes around and crawls the bad links. Now it values the disavow command and the disavow works.
At the time of writing the link detox boost tool, is not available but we are promised it very soon. Unfortunately it is not going to be available in the lower end packages from link research tools. So my plan is to find 5 to 10 people who require this service and split the cost between them. Christoph Cemper showed an incredible case study where the disavow file was submitted and the manual penalty was lifted in three days time. If link detox boost can work like this again and again it is going to be well worth the money.
So the answer to does disavow work? Is yes it does, but the Google bot needs a push to make the disavow affective. Hopefully link detox boost is going to play a very important part in recovering your rankings after you have received a Google penalty. Although this should work in both manual penalties and algorithmic penalties, it is going to be very appealing to those people who have received a manual spam action in the Google Webmaster tools. We are currently expecting link detox boost to be available to the public by the end of 2013, personally I can’t wait.
