Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?

[Shawn124]

Hello,

I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website.  Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links.

I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com".  I used to have 3,000!

Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000.

This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.

[Dr-Pete]

Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.

[MarieHaynes]

I would disavow the blogspot subdomains individually.  So you'd have 1000 lines that say:

domain:subdomain-name.blogspot.com

The documentation for the disavow tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html) says the following:

Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.

What we don't know, however, is if we can do a disavow:blogspot.com to get everything from blogspot.  I wouldn't trust it to do this and I would definitely disavow each individual subdomain.

If you don't have a manual penalty then there is no way to upload anything other than your disavow file to Google.  Your disavow file is not read by a human.  It is machine processed.  You simply need to trust that you have done a thorough job and then, when Penguin refreshes, if you've got a good base of good links you should see an improvement.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I remember G saying that you should include links you've removed in disavow as well. You can add a comment before you list all the removed links but I don't think G manually reads disavow files anyways.

Since it's algorithmic, you just need to disavow/remove all those sitewide footer links and fix your anchor profile. Check out this case study as it is very similar to your situation.

[MoosaHemani]

In my opinion, if you are going to use the main domain that is blogspot.com it will probably disavow any link that is coming from blogspot.com which means if later down the list if you get a good link from the blogspot, even it will not give you any help!

In my case, I used the sub-domains and it worked fine for me!

Hope this helps!

[Shawn124]

@Oleg,

We didn't receive a penalty letter, but our traffic and search queries impression went down when there was an algorithm update with footer links.

I don't have the original list of subdomains that removed our footer links, is it really necessary for Google?  I mean, can't they realize that there aren't SO MANY links coming from Blogspot anymore?  And is there a section in disavow links where i can upload a list of removed links i can show Google?  Or do i just state that I removed so many with a list of the subdomains in a written notice when doing a disavow (never done a disavow, so this is new to me).

THis problem won't continue either because we stopped our partnership with the blog template devloper, so anything after 2 years ago and on...we are not a part of new consumer blogs.

Looking forward to your reply and other suggestions.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I'm assuming you received a manual penalty letter.

I would do the separate subdomains (if this is a complete list and new ones aren't being created) since it shows more effort and won't discredit any links you get from legit .blogspot blogs. Be sure to include the domains you've successfully removed in your disavow file as well.

If this is a problem that will continue (more people will create new sites with your footer link), you might have to disavow the whole domain.