Disavowing the "right" bad backlinks
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Hello,
From july to november (this year), I gained 110.000 backlinks. Considering that I'm having trouble ranking well for any keyword in my niche (a niche that I was ranking #1 for several keywords and now I'm losing), I'm starting to believe that negative seo is affecting me.
I already read several articles about negative seo, some telling this is a myth, others telling that negative SEO is alive and kicking...
My site is about health and fitness in brazilian-portuguese language, and there's polish/chinese/english with warez/viagra/others drugs pointing to my domain and a massive links in comments with blogs without comment approval.
Considering that all these new backlinks are not on my language and are clearly irrelevant, can I disavow them without fear of affecting my SEO even more ?
Everytime you see someone talking about the disavow tool, is always the same warning: "cautiong when disavowing a link, you can hurt you site even more, removing a link that - in some way - was helping you".
Any help or guidelines if I can remove this links safely would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you and sorry for my english (it's not my native language)
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The only danger is if you disavow the wrong links. As long as you are careful not to include legitimate links in with the bad ones in the disavow file you should be fine.
Best practices involve doing a link audit and sorting things out, then contacting webmasters about taking down the links, then running the disavow. Given the apparent clarity that this was an external negative SEO campaign I would consider skipping the second step and including a comment regarding your theory on the origination of the links in the disavow file... but I've never tried that. I've only been in situations where the disavow was based on misguided previous seo efforts, so we went through the removal step.
Hopefully someone else can jump in on that.
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