A Question to Google's Mat Cutts about using Disavow Tool

Yesterday I published this post to explain about the growth of our Motivational Quotes website TheQuotes.Net

Though our site is getting good response from Social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, it is performing poorly in Search engines, especially it is NOT getting any search traffic from Google.

From Google Analytics reports I came to know that the Google Search Traffic for TheQuotes.Net got reduced significantly at end of  May 2012 and September 2012.  So, it seems the site got affected by both panda update and penguin update of Google. Normally/Mostly I follow Google's quality guidelines. But still it got affected by both algorithm penalties.

Past few months I was working hard to recover from these algorithm penalties. As a first step, I contacted Google Team from Google Web Masters Tools to know the reason about this traffic reduction. And, they replied me saying that there is no manual action from their side.

I suspected two things as cause for this issue. One is, footer/site-wide menu link  to our motivational Quotes site from our other websites. I thought it may be the cause for the Penguin attack. So, I either removed them or added "rel=nofollow" attribute.

And, other thing is, I used to add the author name under each Quotes when publishing the list of Quotes. I thought it will be useful for the users to copy the quotes with author name so that he can easily use in his social media status updates. But I came to know that Google will be thinking that it will be keyword stuffing. So, I removed those repeated author names. I think it will be better if Google provides some option to hide these texts from Google while still visible to users . (something similar to rel=nofollow for links)


Apart from these things, I have done lot of other things. For example I have taken lot of steps to improve page loading performance as  I explained in this post. And I tried to use Google's Disavow Tool for thequotes.net as explained in this post. But I have to redirect the site from thequotes.net to www.thequotes.net to make it work with cloudflare. So, I am not sure whether my Disavow request from thequotes.net will be valid for www.thequotes.net

More than two months passed after removing the links from our other sites. But Google web master Tools is still showing those links as back links.

I contacted Google Web Spam Team Head Mat Cutts  thro' Twitter to ask about it. But I didn't get any response from him. Because of Twitter's 140 characters limitation, I had to ask the question in very generic way. That may be the reason for not getting response from Mat Cutts.

So, I wanted to ask Mat Cutts by providing complete details. That's why I am writing this post. I plan to ask Mat Cutts by referring this post after publishing it.

My question to Mat Cutts is,

Whether I need to use the Disvow Tool to exclude the links from our other sites even after I remove those links, while Google Web Masters tool is still showing them as backlinks even after two months.


I believe this time Mat Cutts will reply for my question as I have provided enough details. I will update this post with more details if I get answer from Mat Cutts.





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