Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site

[Kingof5]

Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site?

We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site.

Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.

[Chris.Menke]

It won't hurt to disavow positively known spammy back links and your rankings drops may in fact be due to penguin, but don't yet be 100% sure you were the one hit with the penalty--like I said the way it looks know, it appears more like one/some upstream link(s) got whacked and you're feeling the effects of less link juice.  Time will tell.  In the mean time, focus on creating content that your audience can use and share and work your social media channels.

[Kingof5]

Virtually all our big keywords/category names took hits in rankings on the day of and day after this recent Penguin update so that makes it seem like it's Penguin. On average they lost about 5 positions, but some lost as few as 1 and some lost 15+. But it clearly affected our whole site. Our idea was to test out removing the links on one subcategory and if it worked to do it for the rest of the site.

The guy they had building links for years did all the typical stuff - directories, spam sites, reciprocal linking, links with non-relevant sites, etc. We sell outdoor products and I've found backlinks on penis enlargement sites, anchor text for products we've never sold, etc. The backlink profile is very, very bad. Even if Penguin wasn't the culprit, these backlinks have to be hurting our rankings.

[Chris.Menke]

David,

For what reasons are you certain it's penguin?   You don't typically hear of penguin penalties being assessed in a small way on a individual parts of a site or of the penalty being removed because links were cleaned up to only a portion of a site.  I tend to think of penguin as more of an all-or-nothing type of penalty that takes the site all the way down to the bottom of the search results.  Remember, sites that are linking to you and that were passing link juice could have been penalized and in tern you lost only that much link juice to your site--making it appear that you've been penalized.

In any case, if it is penguin, I don't think you'd be able to clean it up and see results a category at a time.  Of those I've heard about getting out of the penalty, they've had to clean up all their links and work diligently on content to escape.