After domain level link disavow, only partial link update in WMT

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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After domain level link disavow, only partial link update in WMT

migumbo

5:00 am on Jan 14, 2013 (gmt 0)

3-4 weeks ago, we decided on disavowing about 700 backlinks that we had in common across about 8 domains. We figured they might have been harming the reputation of all the sites, and setup removing them with the disavow tool (as well as doing a manual backlink cleanup).

Many of these links had possibly already been discounted by Google, but who knows.

All links were disavowed at the domain level. It now appears that the link profile has changed for the sites we did the disavow for, but even though we disavowed the entire domain most of the domains we disavowed are still there, but with less links.

Has anyone had similar experiences with domain level disavowing malfunctioning?

kheadley

9:47 am on Jan 14, 2013 (gmt 0)

I think it would just take a little while for Google to process all of the links and update WMT, We manually removed a lot of links and quite a few are still showing in Google WMT.

rubinetto

11:17 am on Jan 14, 2013 (gmt 0)

Not a malfunctioning issue.
The disavow tool doesn't remove the links and will show in WMT unless physically removed.

Google links update take time, but in disavow case are useless and the real question is: how do I know what links were disavowed?

Only Google knows...

migumbo

8:33 pm on Jan 14, 2013 (gmt 0)

that's what I thought, another one of those only Google knows scenarios

Robert Charlton

10:53 pm on Jan 14, 2013 (gmt 0)

the real question is: how do I know what links were disavowed?

Chances are you'd better keep good records. ;)

A little bell goes off here with regard to disavow and Google Webmaster Tools reports. Note in this thread the quote (reported by martinacastro) from John Mueller about disavowed links....

Partial recovery from Penguin
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4531420.htm [webmasterworld.com]

if you use the disavow tool that would be similar to adding a nofollow to those links

The twist here, if you remember from various discussions in this forum, is that in WMT Google shows us ("for reference") nofollowed backlinks along with dofollow backlinks.

I agree with kheadley that "it would just take a little while for Google to process all of the links and update WMT", but it's perhaps not yet clear what Google is going to do in WMT with the disavowed links once they do process them. It's interesting that they are showing that some have been removed.

migumbo - I'm curious if you can characterize the links from processed domains that are still remaining vs the links from the same domains that were removed from WMT. Eg... did Google show removal, say, of links from important pages (most likely to be spidered frequently), while keeping links from obscure pages (that don't get frequent spidering)...?

...or, is the pattern just the opposite?

ZydoSEO

3:55 am on Jan 15, 2013 (gmt 0)

Regardless of whether Google has decided to show disavowed links along with followed links in WMT (the same way they do nofollow links)... even though you disavowed at the domain level you will have to wait for Google to re-crawl each one of those links individually and flag it as disavowed one-by-one the same way they process individually disavowed links. Disavowing at the domain level simply reduces the amount of work that you have to do as a webmaster. I doubt very seriously it would affect how they process disavows.