Noticed a drop in ranks? This might be the reason
Hey everyone,
I've noticed one of my websites having a large drop in organic traffic. When analyzing the backlinks I've noticed a large number of backlinks like these:
From both blogspot.com sub-domains as well as various top level domains.
I've done a link detox and recovered most of my traffic for the first domain but this seems to happen across numerous domains by now.
Just letting you know if you still scratching your head looking for answers.
I've noticed that as well on my own sites but the links' owners then delete them after a short time, though you still see them in reports.
Yeah, I know - the pages change often & quickly. And luckily switched off fairly soon. The question for me was really:
How much effort does Google take it into consideration? Just because the link was removed by now doesn't mean Google has recrawled it. My simple non-representative test of simply disavowing gave me a solid boost, so I thought it's worthy to share.
I'm confused how these backlinks would be dropping your traffic and what process you used to clean them up? Thanks for sharing.
Hey @dbredvick
happy to elaborate more:
Backlinks from undesirable websites and pages (porn, gambling, etc.) can "put" you in their neighborhood. Similar effect can happen for pages on regular sites, which link mostly to undesirable sites. With this, your site will be included less in "regular" search results and more in search results for undesirable websites (where you don't rank as you don't have any matching keywords usually). It's kind of a parallel non-safe search version of Google.
If one or two sites of this nature link to you it's not a problem, but it becomes hundreds it gets tricky. On one website I've had 165 unique articles plus two domains with numerous articles to remove. All of them popped up in a matter of a week.
If you notice an sudden drop in search traffic it might be such links (or a Google algorithm update). It pays to check backlinks using a tool such as ahrefs (free account is enough) and then disavow these links. It's a pretty simple process: create a text file with links you don't want to have considered against your website and upload it. Took effect after 2-3 days for me.
Let me know if this helped explaining the background a bit more.
Peter