What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site

[Taiger]

What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.

[MarieHaynes]

Why do you want to remove the file?  Are you concerned that you may have disavowed links that you shouldn't have?

When you remove the file, then as Google recrawls each of the sites that were listed in your file, they will re-avow them which means that they will once again start to give you the link equity that comes from that link.  If it's a good link then you'll regain some good link equity.  (But then this begs the question of why you would disavow it to start with.)  If it's an unnatural link then at first what will likely happen is nothing as Google will not give you any benefit for this type of link.  But, if you've got enough unnatural links then the next time that Google runs the Penguin algorithm your site will look less trustworthy when it comes to links and you could see a drop in rankings.

It's complicated though.  If you are already under the effects of Penguin and you filed a disavow and then you removed your disavow then really nothing would happen.

I wouldn't recommend removing your disavow file unless you feel that you have accidentally disavowed links that are good ones.  If you're not sure if you've done that then you should consider having someone review your links for you and give you an idea of which ones should be disavowed.

[Taiger]

Thanks again Chris, I will take on board your advice and go through the disavow file.

[GPainter]

It's risky only you know whats in the disavow file you can always go through it and see if there are any links in there that maybe don't need to be in there just may want to be careful not to seem like you're trying to manipulate Google but overall it's a bit like changing lots of no follow links to follow.

If you want to try it you can try it on the safe site and analyze whats in there and over time see how taking a few links out at a time see if you get an impact its a bit more controlled as well as if something goes wrong you can see what links caused it.

Google has said its good to be proactive and remove bad links before they are a problem and its perfectly normal however I've seen people overreact a bit to this advice and remove links that where natural etc. so whats best for return on your time removing disavow or working on getting more links.

Here are some helpful links -

http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

"This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

Hope that some of the above gives you an idea

[Taiger]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. the question has been bothering me for a while and I wonder if there is anyone else who was advised to remove bad links even if one has not had a manual penalty, but may have seen a decline in traffic.

We saw a drop in traffic, but last week we removed all Google tracking analysis and reinstalled it, and bam the traffic that we thought we had lost was not so bad after all. (we are still monitoring this) Hence why I was wondering if we were to remove the disavow fill will Google see this a a negative.

[GPainter]

The Disavow file is basically telling Google to turn the links into no follows or in other words you don't want to be associated with the sites. Removing the file could do one of two things give you a penalty if you were proactively removing bad sites it may give you a boost in search if you had some random urls in there. You want to ask your self why you put the links in there in the first place.