Should I use the Disavow Links tool?

About a month ago, I was posting some manual blog comments on sites my competitors also have links on. Here is what happened:



As you can see, my backlinks nearly doubled. This is all from one link placed. They have a feed on the site that shows recent comments on the sidebar, so my link is now on 700 + pages of their site. The link is also no-follow so now my ratio of no-follow to do-follow is 1.2:1.
Ahrefs shows discovering these links around March 1. A couple of my keywords, including a keyword I was ranking number 1 for months is now completely gone, which happened with the March 6 refresh. I don't know whether i'm jumping to conclusions or not that this is what did it, but it makes my link velocity look atrocious.

I feel like my options are:
- Wait till comment gets bumped off the sidebar widget (The site is getting comments at an extremely low rate, could take months)
- Use the disavow tool
- Wait out the refresh for a couple of weeks to see if anything bounces back.

I can't tell you much about your drop in rankings but I will tell you this:

I have not, and will not, use the link disavow tool. I do not believe this tool will help us website owners, nor do I think this tool was created to help us website owners.

But I am paranoid like that.

Exact same thing happened to my site! I posted on this one site, the side bar was on over 11k pages so therefore I got over 11k backlinks, my rankings dropped! I have since removed the link but GWT is still showing the links ....

waiting for the links to clear to see if my rankings will come back.

for you I suggest just wait until the links clear up, it will be time consuming but is better way of going about it.

If you want to openly confess to Google you've been violating their TOS, you go right ahead.

I will say this though, that spike is consistent with a lot of sites I've seen on Ahrefs. I think it's more to do with their crawler rather than anything else.

Emerica,

The disavow tool should be used as a last resort and as smeems points out, if you have been doing something you shouldn't have, this probably isn't the best route. That aside, are you sure this is what is causing your drop in rankings? There are so many other factors to look at and it would seem that if the site is reputable that it doesn't really matter. I would strongly suggest not using the tool as a "quick fix" (and it's not quick) for something you aren't even sure is the issue.

Have you tried contacting the website to get the link removed?
One thing about disavow tool is that Google wants to see that you have made a concerted effort before coming to them to get the link removed. Check out this blog post from Cutts on what a legitimate link removal request looks like (attempted correspondence from the offending domain included).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

Hope that helps,

Shawn

TheContentAuthority said:

Emerica,

The disavow tool should be used as a last resort and as smeems points out, if you have been doing something you shouldn't have, this probably isn't the best route. That aside, are you sure this is what is causing your drop in rankings? There are so many other factors to look at and it would seem that if the site is reputable that it doesn't really matter. I would strongly suggest not using the tool as a "quick fix" (and it's not quick) for something you aren't even sure is the issue.

Have you tried contacting the website to get the link removed?
One thing about disavow tool is that Google wants to see that you have made a concerted effort before coming to them to get the link removed. Check out this blog post from Cutts on what a legitimate link removal request looks like (attempted correspondence from the offending domain included).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. Yeah i've emailed the website through their contact form and through my email so I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Is this still relevant? I dont like to assume too much.

Cheers.