Hi guys, David McSweeney here with Ahrefs.
Today I'm going to show you how to use Ahrefs
to find low-quality links pointing to your website
and how to create a disavow file for uploading to Google.
So we're going to start off in
our Ahrefs' dashboard and the first thing you're going to need to do if you
haven't done it already, is just add your site into your
dashboard so you can just do that by clicking add a website.
In this case, I've already added the domain
which is top 5 SEO and the reason I'm going to
use top 5 SEO is that a couple of years ago I was subject to a negative SEO
attack so I know there's lots of low quality links pointing to the site.
So once it's added, we'll pop it into the search bar and click explore
which will take us to the overview page for the domain.
There's a few processes we're going to run through here,
but the first one is simply just to use the referring
domains report under backlink profile, which will give us a list of all domains
are currently pointing to the website.
Now by default this is going to be
ordered by Domain Rating (DR) with the most powerful sites at the top so we can see
a DR 94 and 85 etc.
But as we're looking for low-quality links what we're going to do is
just click on DR to flip that around and get the lowest quality
sites at the top.
And then we're just gonna work our way down the list looking
for anything that looks low-quality or suspicious.
You'll be looking out for domains you don't recognize here
or perhaps foreign language sites or .xyz domains there.
They can be pretty dodgy, not every time but,
certainly worth looking at Chinese domains can be quite bad for spam so
that's something else you want to check.
I'll take a look at a couple of these
here once you find something you don't like you can just click here to show backlinks.
And we can see that anchor text there is 'link emperor review.'
It's scored out because I've since 404'ed that page but I'll definitely want to disavow it.
To check the actual sites themselves, just simply
click on the link here and it will open up in a new tab and we can see that this is
just a little quality spun content with a link back to my site. So that's definitely
one I want to get rid of.
So what I want to do, is check the box here to the left,
move on to the next one,
and we can see it's the same anchors, 'link emperor results', 'link emperor' etc.
So I can just click the box again.
Now you want to work your way through all these domains, but I won't bother doing that
just now because it'll take some time.
I'll just scroll back up and we can see we've
now got the option to disavow domains.
So I'll click that.
And I'll show you what will happen next there in a second, but for the moment I'll show you another
couple of useful reports you can run.
If perhaps, you might have had an SEO company
working for you, maybe they've been a bit aggressive with their anchor text or
giving you too many keyword rich links and you might have received a
penalty because of that, so a good thing to do is check your anchors so that
shows your the anchor text of all links pointing to your site and if I click on that report,
we can see that right at the top I've got these 'link emperor results',
'link emperor review' etc. And there's lots of referring domains with those anchors.
So if I click on details and then referring domains, I can see there are
referring domains themselves now I can add these directly to my disavow file
from here, but what I can do is just export that out and I can use that to
manually create my disavow file at a later stage.
Finally a useful report is just
your 'best by links' report, which shows you the most linked to pages on the website.
We can see again right up at the top, we've got this 404 page with
a 120 referring domains.
I know that all of these are just spam.
So, if I click on the number under RD, that'll give me all these domains,
and again I can just export that out and then I can create a disavow file from there.
So now if I net back to the dashboard
I'll show you what to do with the domains I added earlier and the
referring domains report.
Scroll on down to the site then click on disavow links.
We can see those 2 domains have been added in here.
And if I just click on export,
then check the box to save as text for upload to Google disavow tool, click OK.
And if I open that up, we can see Ahrefs has created a file in the format for uploading to Google.
We've got domain : than the domain which
basically means that Google should disavow any links from that domain
pointing to your site.
Now the first thing you'll want to do before this process
is to try and manually remove any links point to your site. So reach
out to the linking site and ask them to remove the link if it's low quality.
However, in this case I know that I wouldn't have any luck with that because
it was a negative SEO attack, so I want to go ahead, create a disavow file and
upload that to Google.
So that's the process of finding low-quality links
with Ahrefs and creating a disavow file. Once you upload the disavow file, once
Penguin refreshes, which hopefully should be at some point in the near future,
you should start to see a recovery in your search traffic.
Any questions just leave a comment below. Thanks!