Disavowing Links

[zee007]

The answer here is pretty obvious, but should I disavow spammy links even if the the homepage has a PageRank? A client of mine has tons of directory and social bookmarking links, but some of them have PageRank? Should I leave those or get rid of them? I mean they are clearly spammy for sure, bur almost 90% of the client's baclinks are comprised of these low quality links. I'm afraid of removing them completely.

Thoughts?

 

[jsonsonj]

The answer here is pretty obvious, but should I disavow spammy links even if the the homepage has a PageRank? A client of mine has tons of directory and social bookmarking links, but some of them have PageRank? Should I leave those or get rid of them? I mean they are clearly spammy for sure, bur almost 90% of the client's baclinks are comprised of these low quality links. I'm afraid of removing them completely.

Thoughts?

My opinion disavow is a hoax.
I tried and now 7 months further and nothing...
I think they just want to collect spammy links ^^
You can manually remove links by contact webmasters but tons is no go i think the website is lost already if it has so many spammy and low quality links.

 

[Gyuman82]

Go ahead and Disavow them.

It doesn't do s***, especially if you don't even manually remove the links, but it will at least make you feel goooooood.

But isn't life about feeling good anyway?

 

[TrevorB]

I have never used, and probably never will use that tool. Why give Google even more information about links?

 

[validseo]

I have disavowed a total of 1 link... but that one really deserved it... A super spammy competitor got hammered into the ground with google penalties so they 301 redirected their whole site to my website's homepage. Killed my SEO almost overnight. Quadrupled my bot traffic too. Disavowed the domain and everything was fine 2 days later... other than really extreme case like that I wouldn't use it. discrediting backlinks and admitting you have spammy backlinks are two sides of the same sword. Just better to not be in that database at all.

 

[gtothem]

Surely disavow is worth while. Otherwise you could create tons of spammy links on your competitors and drive them into the ground and there is nothing they can do about it.

 

[wizdorf]

Disavow or don't disavow.. Doesn't really matter as the tool doesn't do anything.

If anything you should be asking yourself if you should remove the links.

P.S. - You should as those directory links are garbage and likely the reason for a penalty in the first place.

 

[zee007]

I agree with the above poster.

IF the tool was shit, then we could do negative SEO on all our competitors without any recourse what so ever. Will it make your website bounce back to that No. 3 position? Of course NOT because you got there artificially to begin with, so why would you get back there just because you removed everything???? I cant understand why people would see a different result!?

 

[miluge]

Disavow if you can but depends on the kind of penalty you have. If it is just a google dance do an outreach then disavow after and build good links.

Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

IME disavow can heal a bad penalty but it will not, ever, improve your rankings. I fixed a few penalized sites last year by disavowing all links(yes ALL links), but the first site where I got this to work never returned to the previous strength, not even today, several months after it recovered.

 

[unsungwarrior]

DISAVOW them, for sure!

 

[zee007]

IME disavow can heal a bad penalty but it will not, ever, improve your rankings. I fixed a few penalized sites last year by disavowing all links(yes ALL links), but the first site where I got this to work never returned to the previous strength, not even today, several months after it recovered.

This goes back to what I said previously. Why should rankings go back to their previous strength when that was all created artificially to begin with?

That's like saying I cheated to get to the front of the line, but now that I'm not cheating anymore, can I go back to the front of the line again?

 

[thetagrasper]

Disavow everything and start from scratch.

 

[TropicalSun]

Disavow everything and start from scratch.

Disavowing everything is just down right stupid advice.

To the poster who is asking why removing links can fix the problem. Consider a bad link like a cancer to Google atleast. They more of this cancerous cells you have the more likely you are gonna die or already have started the process of dying.

By removing the links you are removing the cancer cells and the penalty Google has imposed on your website. It's undoing the "cheating" rather than telling Google you cheated and pointing out what links you used to cheat.

Disavow is just a honepot for crowdsourcing unnatural link sources. Don't count on it to do anything.

 

[Deleted member 731332]

I definitely have to agree with this. I have been trying to recover one of my domains that I had gotten penalized for unnatural links. The penalty has been lifted since around september-october of 2013... I disavowed a ton of crap links after turning off the sape links. It just doesn't rank like it should. I made a 2500k word page (very well written and optimized) for a search that has 550 hits per month globally (low competition long tail, no adsense at all on the SERP). This should be easy to rank for even with no backlinks.... well I'm ranking at about #80 lol.

Bartosimpsonio is absolutely right, and his experience is my experience as well.

IME disavow can heal a bad penalty but it will not, ever, improve your rankings. I fixed a few penalized sites last year by disavowing all links(yes ALL links), but the first site where I got this to work never returned to the previous strength, not even today, several months after it recovered.