Potential Implications of using the Disavow tool to remove thousands of links
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So here's the situation. My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production. Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas.
My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info? Is it legit? It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads??? I thought Google was against link farms...
2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences?
-Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.
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Thank you both for the responses, really appreciate it. From what I can tell in G analytics we're not receiving any benefit from these links whatsoever, so I'll contact them first before going the disavow route and ask them nicely to remove us. Thanks again!
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Google's pretty good at figuring out that 30,000 links from one site really should be counted as one in most cases. If that's all that you've had in terms of manipulative linking then I wouldn't worry about disavowing. It's not a bad idea to try to manually get the links removed though.
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I didn't visit the rippling site but it is probably a site like updowner. Maybe you can exclude your site from their site by contacting them.
If not you can use the disavow tool on them if you are unable to get them removed.
The only rare consequence is maybe those links were helping you rank for those pages and disavowing can screw with your rankings. But that is really rare because I'm assuming those links don't even help.
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