ibegin.com

[PurpleWeb]

Hi

I am using brightlocal and i have seen iBegin - Local Search & Business Directory - iBegin listed as a good source of citation and backlink. I am trying to register a number of UK based businesses and when i click the button for the automated phone call the number I receive never works

As any UK members managed to get listed on there.

Thanks

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I can confirm it works regularly for US clients (we do 5-8 iBegin listings a week via phone verification). It may just be a UK thing?

Have you contacted their support?

 

[Marie Haynes]

I have used iBegin from Canada and consider it a good directory.

If it helps, it's not a directory that is listed in my disavow blacklist:

https://mariehaynes.com/blacklist/

I can't speak for UK issues though.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I have used iBegin from Canada and consider it a good directory.

If it helps, it's not a directory that is listed in my disavow blacklist:

https://mariehaynes.com/blacklist/

I can't speak for UK issues though.

Marie, since the word on the street is there is no more Penguin Penalty with 3.0, should we still be disavowing?

Also, sometimes Google says one thing and what they do is another. Are you seeing any instances of Penguin penalties still even though Google says they are no longer an issue?

 

[Marie Haynes]

It's a question I get asked a lot...and to be honest, I'm still on the fence in many cases as to whether or not to disavow. I'll be writing an article soon that goes into great detail on this but I can summarize my current thoughts here.

If you have a link profile that has a high number of links that you (or a company working on your behalf) made, then yes, I still recommend disavowing. You don't want to risk having a manual review and getting a manual action for unnatural links.

But, if you have the odd spammy link you probably don't need to worry.

Still, there are lots of things to consider. Google says they haven't changed their recommendations on disavowing, and they have said several times that disavowing can help with Penguin. Also, there are other algorithms that take link quality into account, so if you have unnatural links then I wouldn't want them to be a part of Google's PageRank calculations.

Something happened with a major algo change yesterday and I'm just about to dig into that. It sounds like there might be a connection to links. It will be interesting to see if disavow has played a role here.

 

[Carleton Wilkins]

Hey Josh & Marie,

We've been hosting this debate for some time as well when we came along the following article that demonstrated the effect of negative SEO on a given domain in the Post-Penguin 4 world. The conclusion: "Penguin 4.0 is in fact updating in real time, but it would seem that they are not devaluing all bad links."

Interesting read SEO Hero | Meet Fishkin's SEO Heroes

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Hey Josh & Marie,

We've been hosting this debate for some time as well when we came along the following article that demonstrated the effect of negative SEO on a given domain in the Post-Penguin 4 world. The conclusion: "Penguin 4.0 is in fact updating in real time, but it would seem that they are not devaluing all bad links."

Interesting read SEO Hero | Meet Fishkin's SEO Heroes

Wow, great article Carleton.

What do you think Marie?

 

[Marie Haynes]

I hadn't realized that this article was from Wix themselves.

The problem here, though is that it's really tough to prove that the unnatural links pointed at the site were the culprit. The site was ranking on page 7 of Google. Someone recently posted an image that showed that once you go beyond page 1, rankings can fluctuate wildly from hour to hour. It was quite interesting.

Wix noticed the ranking drop January 5. They don't say when they filed a disavow, but it likely would have taken at least a couple of days if not longer to get that put together. But let's say they were superhero disavowers and they got the disavow filed on January 6. The recovery apparently happened 6 days later.

When you file a disavow, Google works to discount the links in your disavow file as they crawl the web. There is no way that Google revisited these spammy domains in 6 days. Domains like that would take weeks or months to crawl.

I think it's unlikely that the disavow was responsible for the "recovery". I think it likely was a normal ranking fluctuation.

The site is currently on Page 9 for me, which is probably quite disappointing to the Wix team!

 

[PurpleWeb]

Hi, What is this blacklist you have advertised. How was it complied please

 

[Marie Haynes]

Hi "PurpleWeb",

For years my main line of business was helping sites recover from manual actions and from Penguin algorithm hits. I have audited millions of links over the last five years. Whenever I do a link audit, if I come across a domain that I would always disavow, I add it to my disavow blacklist.

The blacklist also contains some whitelisted domains that I know link to many sites but would never be an unnatural link.

I've got tens of thousands of domains on this list and it really helps me get through link audits quickly. It's also super helpful for quick checks. I have a bulk upload tool that will quickly tell me whether a site has a lot of links that are in my blacklist.

It doesn't replace the need for a link by link audit for most sites, but it does speed things up considerably for me.