Is There Value in Disavowing Links if you there is No Google Penalty?

[RosemaryB]

I have just started using Link Detox to determine if our clients have links/domains pointing to their sites that could be harming them in organic search. In a few cases 7%-9% of links have been flagged as a high priority to be disavowed.

I would be interested in your opinion on the following:

1. If your site does not have a Google penalty is there an advantage to disavowing pages that have been flagged as high risk? When I go to those pages they look spammy and have no real value other than an inbound link.

2. If a client acquires another website/company and that website is now 301 redirected to the client's site, would "high risk" inbound links from the acquired company cause a problem for my client?

3. A client has taken down content from their site that was completely unrelated to their current business. Is there a benefit in disavowing those links to the old content that are deemed by Link Detox as being high risk?

Thank you,

Rosemary

[MarieHaynes]

I do a lot of link audits and most of the sites that I am working on do not have a penalty. Some have been suppressed by Penguin and some are sites that are trying to avoid a future Penguin hit because they've had low quality link building done for them in the past. When a site is affected by Penguin, the algorithm can act like an anchor that pulls the site down and keeps the site from ranking at their full potential. But, it's often difficult to know whether Penguin is affecting you or not because Google doesn't give you any notification or warning of the fact. As such, if there are possibly low quality links present then yes, by all means, disavow!

I want to caution you though to not rely blindly on Link Detox data. I have reviewed many disavow files that have been created after using this tool and they are horrendously inaccurate. I've seen automated link auditing tools recommend disavowing fantastic naturally earned press links from highly authoritative sites. And, what usually happens more often is that the tool classifies many unnatural links as good ones.

I think that these tools can be helpful when it comes to putting your links together in a manageable form, but you absolutely must look at each link individually. You can probably go straight to disavow for some links such as ones that come from sites that are obviously just for links such as freelinkdirectory.com or something like that. But, in most cases, a critical human eye needs to be used to look at each link and determine if it exists just for SEO purposes or has legitimate purpose outside of SEO.

So, to answer your questions:

1. Yes...go ahead and disavow even if there is no penalty. But as mentioned above, manually check these links first before disavowing. And don't worry that filing a disavow is going to put you on Google's radar. That's not true.

2)Yes, a 301 redirect passes link signals to the redirected site. So, if you purchased a site that has spammy links pointing to it and redirected that site to your main site you will have spammy links pointing to the main site. You'll need to file a disavow on the main site that contains the domains that are linking to the site you purchased and redirected. With that said, if there are a LOT of spammy links, you may want to assess risk vs reward. It's possible you won't be able to find and disavow all of the unnatural links and could invite Penguin issues on the new site. If the domain is one that could get a lot of type in traffic and you really want to redirect it there are ways you can redirect without passing on any link equity such as redirecting through an intermediary page that is blocked by robots.txt.

3. If the links you are asking about are now pointing at 404 pages then they are essentially removed and you don't need to disavow those links.

Hope that helps!

Marie

[TheZenAgency]

Yeah i agree with Peter, nothing wrong with  being proactive in disavowing. Just be careful to make sure you not disavowing links which are helping you rank

[Mobilio]

Yes! There are reasons in this too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFJZXpnsRsc
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2309486/matt-cutts-use-the-link-disavow-tool-even-if-your-site-hasnt-been-penalized

"If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks
like there's some weird bot that's building up a bunch of links to your site
and you have no idea where it came from, that's the perfect time to use
disavow as well," Cutts said. "I wouldn't worry about going ahead and
disavowing links even if you don't have a message in your webmaster console."

"So if you've done the work to keep an active look on your backlinks and you
see something strange going on, you don't have to wait around," Cutts said.
"Feel free to just go ahead and pre-emptively say, you know what this is a
weird domain, I have nothing to do with it, and no idea what this particular
bot is doing in terms of making links, so go ahead and do disavows even on
a domain level."

So - disavowing w/o Penguin is good defense tactics. Because as webmaster you know what are your good links, regular links in SearchConsole. But you can do audit on some period (one, two or three months) and checking what are new "bad" links from low-quality sites. Then just disavow them to keep linking profile good as possible.