Should I Disavow Backlinks? Or keep them anyway?

I've been having trouble ranking my site for my targeted keywords and I see everywhere that people say that bad links can hurt you, and some would say to disavow bad badlinks. I have also read some people say that any link is good and never to disavow them. I do not have any Google manual actions, and don't have any indicators for spam. my site is not deindexed.

I'm just curious to whether or not having certain links can actually do harm to you in that sense, whereas Google won't even tell you, but you'll just find it very hard to rank for your keywords?

Any suggestions?

You can check the spam links score with SEO spyglass and then grab all of them to disavow which hurt your rankings. Check for anchors, spam score,it gives quite a detailed report. There are some youtube videos which can help if you have never used it before.

There are many more instances of Google confirming that disavowing links alone is not enough, and removals will have to take place in order to recover from a link penalty. Even when the Disavow Tool was finally launched, Google still recommended removing as many links as possible.

I personally wouldn't disavow any links. It's a low yield activity. One it's time intensive, two it hasn't been demonstrated to make much of a difference, three, you don't even know that they are for sure the cause of your lower ranking.

I would spend time building PBNs and Web 2.0s.

The only instance where I might disavow links is if my anchor text ratios are way out of wack.

Mostly it depends on niche, if you are not ranked for main keywords then move to long tails and LSI.

Use majestic to verify low-quality links by knowing their TF and CF and then disavow them, if you think that is the main cause.