What Happens if You Remove Your Disavow File?
Last month, there were a lot of mixed messages at Pubcon on if Google’s disavow file is now redundant.
This is mainly because penguin is now baked into the core algorithm, and the theory is that SEOs may now just be giving Google data, but it’s no longer necessary in order to impact rank…
In my opinion, the biggest strength of any SEO is curiosity — you should be being able to absorb information, but not take it as gospel…
Which could only mean one thing, I had to test it out myself!
So last month, on 13th October, I removed the disavow file (which previously contained 977 domains) from an experiment website which had previously been banned from Google after being hit by a penguin penalty in May 2012 and still receives a fairly significant volume of traffic from Google organically, with the penalty revoked since Oct 2013:
To benchmark the progress, I wrote about this on the BlueGlass blog and we’re now over 3 weeks in, with some interesting results:
In order to assess this, the starting point was taken with the above stats (1,981 clicks, 30,664 impressions, 6.46% CTR and 10.2 average ranking position.
Today, the stats are as follows:
- Clicks: 2,402 (21% increase)
- Impressions: 33,365 (8.8% increase)
- CTR: 7.2% (11% increase)
- Position: 10.2 (0% increase)
In other words — the average rank has remained exactly the same (this did see an initial drop down to a low of 11.6, rising to a peak of 9.8 and returning back to its starting point of 10.2), but the increased impressions and clickthrough rate have resulted in an 11% increase in organic traffic.
At this stage, I don’t want to get too carried away.
I’m sure a “How removing a disavow file increased organic traffic by 21%” headline is more attention grabbing, but it’s still based over a small time-period and I’m not sure it’s that accurate just yet as the impression trends may turn out to be seasonal.
However, this does appear to be a very promising start, with rankings remaining consistent, whilst traffic has gone up… It’s just too early for me to confidently state that this was a successful move, or one that I would recommend for others.
Key learnings so far:
- Audit your disavow file — we found that 28% of domains in the disavow file were now dead, with a further 3% of sites up for sale. Google have confirmed that it’s safe to remove links from the disavow once they have been removed.
- Don’t be afraid to test theories — SEO is all about experimentation and finding what works for you. By all means learn as much as you can, but test it out yourself — ideally on experiment sites first!
Let me know if you have any questions or comments on this, as I’m keen to run this as an experiment to push the boundaries a little and learn what does and doesn’t work, so more than open to testing out ideas on this!
About The Author
Kevin Gibbons is a co-founder of Re:signal. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
