Is it good practice to update your disavow file after a penalty is removed.

[podweb]

I was wondering if you could use the disavow file by adding to it - even after your site has recovered from a partial site penalty.

As a recurring SEO procedure, we are always looking at links pointing to our Website. We then ascertain those links that are clearly of no value. In order to clean these up, would it be good practice to update your disavow file with more of theses domains.

Is the disavow file just used for penalty issues to alert google of the work you have done?  (we have had penalty in the past but fine now)

Would this method help in keeping high quality links to the fore and therefore removing low quality links from Googles eyes?

I would welcome your comments.

[podweb]

Thanks -really good advice

[MarieHaynes]

Sounds good.  When it comes to deciding on disavow vs removal, if you have no manual penalty, then my advice is to remove any links you actively control and then disavow the rest.

Here's more info:

searchenginewatch.com/article/2374406/Penguin-Recovery-Should-You-Be-Removing-Links-or-Just-Disavowing

[podweb]

HI Marie and thanks for your response.

Our penalty recovered about 7 months ago and we have seen a gradual increase in rankings.

However I keep finding unnatural links appearing and there are no contact details associated with these sites.

I had set in place a regular procedure to check out what's happening link-wise and I think its good practise to somehow remove these links. We can't manually get rid of them so to disavow was our next logical step. it keeps things clean but I wasn't sure if it would be shaking the Google tree!!

I will download the file and update with new spam sites.

[HashtagHustler]

In addendum to my response....

I would take pretty much anything MarieHaynes says as The Word when it come to anything relating to disavowing. She is the resident queen when it comes to penalties. She assisted me early on with some of my struggles and happens to know a lot more about this stuff than me!

[MarieHaynes]

Yes!

In almost every site for which I have removed a penalty, we keep seeing unnatural links that appear over time.  Some of them may be the result of old automated link building tactics that are still replicating.  Some may be negative SEO.  And I think many of them are old links that just couldn't be found by the link checking tools until now.

You will likely want to do monthly disavows for some time until you start seeing that no new unnatural links are appearing.

Keep in mind that when you update your disavow you are overwriting your current file, so you need to download your file, convert it to .txt, add on to it, and then reupload it.

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

The disavow tool, is a very powerful tool, and one that should, in my opinion, be used with caution. Google even hands out a warning before doing anything.

The strictly state that it should be used as a last ditch effort. My personal opinion is to only use it as that, last case scenario. If there are links that are just low-quality and not necessarily associated with your website, I personally wouldn't use the disavow.

There is no such thing as a link with no value, look at the site it's coming from, and the page it's going to. Is there anyway you could leverage potential traffic from that page?

If the links are 100% spam, and are causing you to be concerned, then I think that warrants uploading to the disavow tool.

Use the tool with caution my friend.

Hope that helps.