Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Ross Raffi on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/14/2020).

Disavowing internal backlinks

Say you have a media company, X Corp, who is looking to rank their subsidiary "X Media." The problem is that they`ve decided, in their infinite wisdom, to link back to X Media from all of their other properties with the anchor text "advertise." The anchor text profile is a few naked URLs and dozens of "advertise, " mostly from footers. Coincidentally, "X Media" does not even appear on the first page of results for the query "X Media."If the goal is to get "X Media" ranking for the query "X Media, " would disavowing these "advertise" anchor texts have any positive impact?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Michael Martinez: Geeze, don`t disavow all those links!

    Take the PageRank and run with it. So what if you don`t have anchor text to work with? That probably makes the links safer.
  • Ross Raffin: I wasn`t precise enough: there are 201, 000 links coming from 7 domains, all with the anchor text "advertise." The seven domains are X Corp`s newspapers.

    The page is not ranking for any keywords in the top 50.

    It isn`t even ranking its own homepage for a branded query.
  • Michael Martinez: Ross Raffin If the business relationship between the 8 domains is obvious I don`t think the links are causing any problems. The search engines say they would ignore them.

    But you could try an experiment and disavow 1 domain, wait about a month, and see if anything moves.

    If you see improvement then disavow 2 more domains, wait about another month, and see if anything moves.

    If after you disavow the first domain nothing changes you have to decide "all or nothing". Either disavow all 6 remaining domains or undo the first disavow.

    Based only on what you`ve described above, my instinct would be NOT to disavow any or all 7 domains.

    With 201, 000 sitewide footer links coming from 7 co-owned domains, if there is no manual action notice in Google Search Console then I seriously doubt there is anything bad happening because of those links.

    They may not be passing any PageRank at all. If that is the case then disavowing them won`t hurt anything (but you`ll never get any PageRank from any other links on those domains).

    If, however, even only minute fractions of PageRank are being allowed to pass, you`ll just make your job harder if you disavow those 7 co-owned domains.

    Based only on what you`ve shared so far, I don`t see a compelling reason to even do a disavow test with 1 domain.
  • Stockbridge Truslow: I agree with Michael... don`t kill things. Most everyone links to their parent company or subsidiaries in the footer or wherever.

    Structured Data can help establishing the structure and relationship of entities within a corporation too - and if you can establish that, then all those links have context. They may not help rank for "media" related searches if X Media is X Corp`s only media property, but they`ll help it for brand searches. That structured data helps set up X Media and X Corp as brand entities and gives them some context and a frame to build off of, also.

    If the other sites are all subsidiaries and part of the same network of companies within a single parent organization - structure up the whole thing.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/14/2020).