Someone on Reddit asked for help troubleshooting two separate ranking issues that were happening simultaneously. Google’s John Mueller responded with encouragement on how to take a broader view of SEO problems in order to better catch what is going on.
Two Intersecting Problems
The person asking the question had two problems:
1: Google Business Profile
Their Google Business Profile was suspended by Google and their attempts to get it unbanned failed. They also tried starting a new business profile but that also ended in failure.
2. Disavowing Links Ends In Disaster
The Redditor reviewed their backlinks and discovered over 800 “toxic” links so they filed a link disavow. In general, a link disavow is designed to be used to disavow links that you are responsible for and know are spammy. But not everyone is aware of the rules, particularly this person, and what happened next is that their organic rankings collapsed within two weeks of disavowing their links.
The Redditor asked:
“What would you recommend doing at this point to recover my rankings as quickly and safely as possible? Is there anything I can do to reverse or mitigate the effects of the disavow, especially if I accidentally disavowed some links that were actually helping me?
I would really appreciate an expert opinion on whether the ranking drop could realistically be related to the disavow, or whether I should be looking for another cause. I am also interested in any legitimate tactics that could help me regain the first-page position faster, as the situation is having a direct impact on my business.”
So, basically, they had multi-part questions and a GBP issue:
- Did the disavow cause the organic ranking loss, or is something else responsible? And what is the best approach to take to recover?
- The Business Profile suspension was the initial context of the post but it was the link disavow that was what they suspected to be the cause of their drop in organic rankings.
Google Suggests How To Move Forward
Google’s John Mueller responded to the post, which apparently attracted negative responses toward the use of the Link Disavow tool.
Mueller’s answer:
“There’s a lot of hate on the disavow tool here – but it has its place & time, it does have effects.
That said, disavowing a handful of links is not going to make your site drop out of search, so a) I’d fix the disavow file to be what you really need/want it to be (which might be empty, or might not be empty), and b) I’d look for other potential reasons.”
Fixing Ranking Problems Can Take Months
Mueller continued his answer, explaining that fixing algorithmic related issues can take months.
For example, there was a broader spam update which might have happened at around that time (I don’t recall the actual date, and you don’t mention a date in your post). If it’s the case the at it aligns with the spam update, to set expectations, fixing issues around bigger algorithmic changes can take quite some time – sometimes many months – until you see the effects.
Another cause I’d look into more deeply is broad & big technical issues (not “oops, wrong canonical” but more like “oops, blocked the whole site”), just to rule out that it’s something easier to fix.”
Mueller’s answer was to first set expectations that fixing an algorithm related search issue is not a quick fix. But fixing mistakes (like accidentally no-indexing a site) are quick fixes.
About Link Disavows
I’ve had conversations with people who have shared anecdotes about how their link disavows for a client was followed by ranking improvements within weeks. And many others, including the Redditor, have experienced similar thing.
But what the Redditor may not be aware of is that link disavows take months to have an effect, not weeks.
John Mueller has answered how long it takes for link disavows to work in Google:
“With regards to this particular case, where you’re saying you submitted a disavow file and then the ranking dropped or the visibility dropped, especially a few days later, I would assume that that is not related.
So in particular with the disavow file, what happens is we take that file into account when we reprocess the links kind of pointing to your website. And this is a process that happens incrementally over a period of time where I would expect it would have an effect over the course of… I don’t know… maybe three, four, five, six months …kind of step by step going in that direction.
So if you’re saying that you saw an effect within a couple of days and it was a really strong effect then I would assume that this effect is completely unrelated to the disavow file. …it sounds like you still haven’t figured out what might be causing this.”
So all of those times that a link disavow seemed to improve rankings after a few weeks: just a coincidence. Link disavows take months to take an effect, if there is any effect.
The other issue about link disavows is that they’re only supposed to be used on links that you yourself are responsible for.
Guest Posts = Spam
Circling back to the Redditor with the drop in organic rankings, something useful they shared is that they were responsible for purchasing guest posts, through Fiverr.
They wrote:
“Unfortunately, this time I may have made a mistake. I included some domains in the disavow file that contained old guest posts I had purchased through Fiverr.
The links were from a different niche and were somewhat spammy, so I considered them toxic at the time, but I am now concerned that some of those links may have still been providing SEO value.”
I am not going to assume that the Redditor made just one mistake. If they’re going out there buying links from Fiverr, it may not be unreasonable to assume there are other SEO issues going on with their site. It really does feel likely that their site was a casualty of Google’s recent spam update.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/B Desain28
