Preemptive Disavow

What are your thoughts on submitting a disavow without a manual action?

Depends on the circumstances. If you take on a client site and the profile is shit then yes. Otherwise, no.

Right on. I appreciate the response.

Did any of that have a positive impact for your rank/traffic... or was it just precautionary?

I think you are pretty sharp in thinking to be proactive when it is obvious there are links that just plain suck tied to your site.

It is something that I do as part of my preliminary process when I am serving a client or buying a domain for a PBN or for one of my money sites and is one of the first things on my checklist.

BassTrackerBoats said:

I think you are pretty sharp in thinking to be proactive when it is obvious there are links that just plain suck tied to your site.

It is something that I do as part of my preliminary process when I am serving a client or buying a domain for a PBN or for one of my money sites and is one of the first things on my checklist.

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Thanks for your reply, Bass. Your opinion is highly respected and carries a lot of weight.

Looks like I have more work to do.

Cheers!

I'm in the same boat...Im working on a site that was ignored for over 8 years and it has tons of backlink exchange pages, old school directories (but links on page are relevant to niche)...i had a so called "expert" look at my backlinks from ahref and he wanted to disavov almost all guest niche blog. He also wanted to get rid of a guest blog that i paid 300 for from a well known and trusted seo company in st Louis...he was once active here and he knows his shit. However I do look at the directories from 2006 and none of those guys are on the map for the anchor link, some changed urls due to penalties i assume. So anyways I got a big list from this "expert" on which ones to get rid of and some make sense and some dont, example I have a post on lawyers.com that he noted should be taken off lol...im like WTF dude are serious? So I have backlinks from 2006 and the ones I built now that are almost all guest blogs in my niche.

Not all penalty will invoke Manual Action. Some could be algo penalty and its wiser to disavow before it hit you.

don't do that. don't do that!
don't want to drag into explanation why and so, but I had experience + I've been told not to do so, and I did submit list to disavow and 12 years old solid site went to ***** within a month.
so, don't do that.

you don't like some links? good - do some trick with htaccess and cloak them to "Under construction" or "Contact us" form ... Easy and safe.

Everyone got different experience with disavow and its impact. For me, I manage recover a penguin penalty site (not manual action) from loss of 98% google traffic to back to normal traffic + more.

Mainly I disavow those really bad links, those with TF/CF less than 10 mainly, and those very shady links.

I don't think there's any harm in a preemptive disavow - provided you have a follow up strategy in place to rebuild any authority that may be lost.
If it's for a client's site then the situation should be fully explained and they should be advised that it is best to act, but that there could be fluctuation in SERPs - but your follow up strategy will then be put into place to build them back up.
I'm sure we've all seen shitty sites which for some reason Google gives an undeserving degree of authority, so don't be surprised if disavowing links that look awful does cause some ranking drops.

Definitely a good idea as if you have a popular site you'll get a lot of crap sites backlinking to you and you may not even know it. If you're not paying attention, that is. If you don't monitor your backlinks, get someone on Fiverr or whereever to run a full backlink check where you'll get a full spreadsheet that breaks down Domain Trust, Authority, Citation Flow, etc. Then you can see how many crap backlinks you have linking to you as Google pays attention them even even though we have no control over them.

Disavowing definitely makes a difference as we had a DA of 65 and in 3 months it dropped to 32 and we found all these bad sites linking to us. It freaking sucks since you have no control, but you'll get those morons who also will do this to you site hoping to drop you down so they can get ahead.

maxchen said:

Everyone got different experience with disavow and its impact. For me, I manage recover a penguin penalty site (not manual action) from loss of 98% google traffic to back to normal traffic + more.

Mainly I disavow those really bad links, those with TF/CF less than 10 mainly, and those very shady links.

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Hi, could you tell me how long does it take to recover and how many links you disavowed please? I'm interested in your experience

coleturner222 said:

Hi, could you tell me how long does it take to recover and how many links you disavowed please? I'm interested in your experience

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It often doesn't work, so there's no time table. If it does work, it takes about 3 months. Google makes the process slow so that you cannot A/B test.