Disavow and link analysis

[freestone]

I am trying to work up a list of Domains to disavow from old SEO black hat (long time ago) and I think some recent bad SEO against the site.  I found a few good articles here and started the process.  Very daunting even on a site that never had a lot of link work done on it.  One particular issue has my attention and need advice on what to do with it.

I find 100s of backlinks that all resolve to the same IP 72.215.225.9 .  Has anyone else seen this one.  These are sites such as mengems.com or http://www.downey-realestate.com .  I am using NetPeak Checker to grab stats on the backlinks after gathering backlinks for 5 different sites.  These site all seem to come from Majesticseo and sure enough if I ping any of them they return 72.215.225.9 on at first and then go not found.  They return a 200 in NetPeak .  I was hoping not open thousands of backlinks to see if they existing before I create my Disavow list.

Couple of questions.

1. Any harm in putting these on the disavow if in fact they really don't exist anymore?  Do the disavow police not like your list being longer than it needs to be ?  I am leaning to just leaving all of them off my list.  Seems I read something that says dont ask google to disavow something that no longer exists because they are not penalizing you for it.

2. If I start with the most egregious Bad  and ex-black hat domains and submit them, wait 3 weeks and the Penguin hit rankings do not recover at all then how to add to the list.  Do I leave all the original disavows on the list, add to it and resubmit ?

3. My first thought was to simple send a list of all domain that have no Google indexed pages regardless of return status code.  Basicly saying please clean the slate of this crap.....thoughts on this?

Thanks

jw

[freestone]

I thoughs so ...just checking.  I get that the PR is only updated periodically.  I just frankly find is super hypocrytical to even index these sites.  In fact I will go further and say that if Google should either.

1. Just ignore links from sites like these as part a sites link profile.

2. publish a list like a wanted board an allow you to simple disavow.

I know once again I think they should think like me and I know this will not going to happen....so off I go to play the game some more.  Expect it to become harder and harder for small or even medium sized business to play this game.  In a few short years page one will belong to the large companies.

I am determined to fix the link profile of this site.  I found 52k backlinks..... Needless to say lots of them are old and the site no longer exists but at least once done I will have a cleaned up link profile.  A new starting point.

Thanks again Ryan

Signed backlink sloger jw

[RyanKent]

JW, your instincts seem solid. I do not understand how you relate a site's PR or number of indexed pages to whether or not it provides manipulative links. The two points are not relevant.

I find both the getbacklinked.com and lookdirectory.com sites do not comply with Google's standards for legitimate directories. Any links from those directories will be viewed as manipulative by Google.

Bing and Google vary in their philosophy. Bing is much more selective about which pages it chooses to add to it's index. When a site violates Bing's guidelines, they often choose to de-index the site.

Google indexes a tremendous amount of low quality pages. Just because the page is indexed does not mean it would ever be found by a reasonable keyword search. Regarding PR, it is simply one of over 200 metrics used to determine rankings. Google has stated in the clearest possible terms SEOs and site owners should greatly reduce their focus on PR. They even reduced PR updates to just a few times a year, but people seem to not get the message.

In summary, you clearly understand the directories offer manipulative links. Accordingly, you need to remove those links in order to resolve your penalty / Penguin issue.

[freestone]

Ryan what do you think about directories like this

http://www.getbacklinked.com/

I don't think they pass the smell test but some do have thousands of pages index at google and even have PR from 1 to 4 on a few of them.

These are kind of like dmoz (a good idea turned joke IMHO).

My inclination is to request an unlink because I personally think that any site that just lists sites should be nuked from the internet.

I have been making as bad any site that has a submit your link or other such button in the top menu bar.

jw

[freestone]

Cool....I will stick to the ones we found that are not natrual if we dont get a reponce to remove.... I am still going to be amazed if any of these sites repond but out of 52k links I almost have the list of domains to contact.  Stuck the exports into a Microsfot Access DB which makes them easier to click and categories.

Cheers

[RyanKent]

should I [disavow] domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site

No. The purpose of the disavow tool is to separate your site from active links which you are unable to remove.

[freestone]

So when I finally get around to disavowing some of these links should I include domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site.  That is to say the links are no longer active.  The reason I ask is there are many like that which are sites which were obvious link farms.....so it google holding those against the site even though those site are no longer active...... I could create a section in the disavow..and comment label it something like

OLD links that show up using various tools but no longer seem to function but we are including in order to make sure the link profile of this site is clean.

????

[freestone]

My plan was to use your last statement as my approach.  "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?  Said perfectly.  Does it mean I will remove some good links....well maybe but if google is not indexing a site then I suspect it is not giving me juice anyway and there are tons of links that google is not indexing.  This site does have some nice links so hopefully cleaning this up will get the site out the the box where penguins are stored.

I used netpeak for these status....great tool but worried me a tad as Malwarebytes blocks some outgoing traffic that tool is trying to send to their web site.  I assume just stat info and not the content of my hard drive....LOL

Thanks for the bing and AHREFs thoughts.  I will go grab them also, netpeak them and pull them in to the ACCESS database where I am making a superset list of junk.  Unformtualy the list is something on the order of 1000 links.  Give are take a few.

[RyanKent]

Hi JW,

I do not personally use any tools to measure a link's age. Google has a new export available in WMT which shows this information as well as several other tools. I have never encountered a situation where a link's age has been relevant to link removal.

With the above noted, a link tool can only tell you the first time the tool discovered the link. Links can be much older than the discovery date for a variety of reasons.

For your backlink report, I highly advise including Bing and AHREFs as well. Otherwise, you will be missing numerous links.

With respect to identifying links, it is my experience most SEO professionals are not aligned with Google when it comes to evaluating a manipulative vs organic link. A few quick tips:

• The PR / PA / DA of a web page should not be a consideration when making a determination of organic vs manipulative

• The anchor text is also not a factor. Here you may say "wait a minute! Penguin specifically detects anchor text". What I mean is...if you change the anchor text on a link to simply a URL, the link itself is no less manipulative.

• 99%+ of general directories are manipulative in my experience. Most niche directories are manipulative as well in my experience.

• Most press releases are manipulative as well

There are tons of other examples and you need to refer to Google's Guidelines and ask yourself "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?

Best wishes

[freestone]

Thanks to the both of you for your help.  Sorry for the tardy reply as I was in transit.  The client has agreed for us to try and contact these sites and request link removal.  If that does not work then we will put a disavow list together and try to get this link profile repaired.  Then we will work harder on some quality links.

It is still hard to swallow that a practice that was once rewarded now requires money to fix....guess we will just caulk that one up to "Life isn't always fair".

I am just going to take Google Recent, Majestic SEO, and Site Explorer put them all together and get to work.

Ryan if you can share the name of the tool that would might give me a better handle on the actual age of the link that would be great.  I don't really want to share the links publicly and have my client to get 100 of calls.  If you are really curious I can PM details to you.

[ShaMenz]

Hi JW,

There are lots of reasons you could be seeing links like this.

I have seen entire websites with hundreds of pages suddenly appear with links to a client's site and even been able to find references to a competitor amongst the hundreds of harmful linking URLs. While this was ringing every "negative SEO" bell for me initially, after careful investigation it became obvious that it was in fact some random person who decided to capitalize on a valuable niche by creating a site using hundreds of spammy articles that had since been deleted from directories by my client and their competitor...

Webmasters have long tried to get exposure for sites by adding links and clicking them or injecting referral data into server logs in the hope that curious site owners will click the referral link to check out the referring site.There are also quite a number of posts out there suggesting that linking out to quality sites can help rankings...as a result there are also people out there with poor sites who are trying to use this to improve their situation.

Most important of all, it is well known that data offered by Google through WMT is notoriously out of date ... I have seen several instances where newly surfaced links have been in place for more than a year.

If there is a mantra to adopt when working on link removals, I would say it is "nothing is ever as it seems".

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

**Here are a few examples that came right from the Google recent export from the webmaster tools and were links identified in Oct. **

There are several possibilities. A page could have been blocked via robots.txt and have since been unblocked. A page could have had the "noindex" tag applied and now it has been removed.

Another possibility is issues with the site architecture. A page could have been buried deep or existing as an island page, but now the navigation is fixed and the link is found.

In order to investigate further, I would need the URL to the actual web page which contains the link to your target site, along with the URL of the site. I need to be able to find the link on the page and use other tools to determine the link's age.

[RyanKent]

Can you share an example of these links which were created in 2012 and you feel are the result of an attack? Are you 100% certain neither the client nor any agent (family member, employee, developer, etc) working on the client's behalf had any part in the creation of these links?

[freestone]

I suppose we would consider a reconsideration request if once these ugly backlinks are removed or disavowed the traffic does not return.  It is tough to think that something that was done 6 years ago now has such a huge cost.  I still think that if you are going to change such a fundamental rule (or finally actually inforce it might be a better way to put it) that you should allow people to simply reset their link profiles via the Disavow tool..... but hey .....no one is going to give me Matt's job anytime soon.

In the case of this site I watch the traffic fade starting the day of Penguin and it dropped more over the course of something like 5 days......It seems pretty clear Penguin implementation is the cause of the traffic lose also becuase long overdue deep on-page work did not help one bit.

Let the hours and hours of work begin....Ugh

I suppose one good thing about trying to get the links actaully removed is that traffic might start to recover during the effort as opposed to load up the disavow and wait.  In that sense we will start with the most agregious sites first.

The one thing I am still puzzled about is the 2012 backlink that are so harmful.  It is hard not to conclude this site is under attack by competitors.  I know everyone like to say this is rare but hey if you are being attacked then for your the stat is 100% ...not rare......why else would really scummy sites be backlinking to this site.  Please someone tell me a reason other than the 3 I have describe in this thread.

[ShaMenz]

...and neither did my first link removal client, but the penalty was revealed when I insisted that he needed to lodge a reconsideration request.

I have heard this story repeated over and over while talking to rmoov users over the past few months...I am quite sure there are way more people out there who are under a manual penalty than anyone realizes.

I have my own theory as to why this has happened, but that's probably for a blog post some time.

In a nutshell, I absolutely agree with Ryan's take on the subject except for one thing...hard earned experience does not in any way amount to bias.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[freestone]

Ryan thanks again for all the discussion.  I will huddle up with my client and see how he wants to proceed. My only doubt that this is what is needed to escape the penguin update is we did not receive the unnatural links notice from Google.

[RyanKent]

I typed a long response and the forum seems to have eaten it. I will briefly respond:

do you actually take the time to visit each site and look for a valid email address

Absolutely. We not only capture the email address but the contact form URL. If we are unsuccessful at reaching webmasters via their WHOIS email, site email and contact form we often take additional steps. For example, we report .com domains to ICANN so they can be recalled. We report bad blogs hosted on wordpress.com, blogspot.com, etc. We call and mail people using the info in WHOIS or their website. We chase people down on social networks. We have to be passionate in order to consistently be successful at removing these penalties. Any less effort means there will be times when we fail to remove a penalty which will cost our clients in lost sales over time.

[freestone]

Thanks much for the dialogue. Yes some time it is hard for me to be as dispassionate about this subject since I help customers with all aspects
of their web presence.  I don’t have 100s of customers and take a special interest in each one of them and get to know
them.

Trust me I would try to be a little more articulate than “Google Sucks” if I really wanted to get into that futile black hole.   If all I wanted to do was take a short cut and go for the perceived easy fix then I would have done that and not posted this and other posts I have made.  I have learned that to go slowly it to go smartly when it comes to reacting to SEO issue.  As a type A trust me this takes great restraint.

The tough thing as you know is that now this company has less sales and therefore less money to fix the mess.

I understand this past transgression has to be overcome but these recent links for porn sites and link farms are not my doing and truth be told those are the ones that have me mad.

There is only three reasons I can think for them

1. Ransom to remove the link.  I have read that this is going on.

2. Competitive Bad SEO.  I truly suspect there might be some of this by looking at the links from early 2012 and recently (pilling on)

3. Some perception that by linking to a site with decent PR that you life your scamy site up in the rankings.

With respect to taking the high road on getting links removed do you actually take the time to visit each site and look for a valid email address or do you simply send a mass email to webmaster@domain.com since all reputable sites should have either that or abuse@ as valid emails addresses and if they do not then shouldn’t that be enough effort spent to request links be removed?

[RyanKent]

**So you think companies that have backlinks placed on porn sites deserver what they get and should have to clean it up.  You think that is the responsibility of the reputable company that did nothing wrong.  **

I never said nor thought that. You will find absolutely no judgment from me. My role as an advisor to you or any client is to provide the most complete and accurate information based on my knowledge and experience. If I were to allow my personal thoughts to get involved it would not be helpful to clients. It would be far easier for me to jump on the bandwagon and shout "evil Google" or "Google sucks". Instead I choose to take the actions which will serve clients best.

Google is a company. They have rules and guidelines. I work to understand those rules / guidelines / procedures as best as possible so I can produce the best results for my clients. Whether you choose white hat or black hat SEO, this aspect of SEO is the same. Where the line differs is I choose to use the knowledge and experience I acquire to stay within Google's Guidelines and maximize results for clients, whereas black hat SEO involves working outside of those guidelines.

Yes this company unknowingly participated in link farm nonsense but has not done sor for at least 5 years and is still gettting these links and they are not criminal.  They are hard working people that made a mistake.

I agree our clients are hard working people. They have made mistakes. If there is one thing I have learned throughout a year of cleaning up these links is Google is intentionally issuing penalties / Penguin as a means of punishing those who have cheated the system. They clearly want these site owners to atone for their past actions by going through a very long and hard process. At every turn when site owners and SEOs attempt to take a short cut in the manipulative link removal process, Google puts up a road block. They could easily just devalue all the bad links (which they do anyway) but Google chooses to take further action. I understand the reasoning. If they simply discounted the bad links, then there is nothing to dissuade SEOs from building more bad ones. Google feels a harsher action is required.

The good news is the penalty can be fully removed along with the negative effects of Penguin. There is a long, hard process which must be followed to achieve that result.

[freestone]

I understand all your say and this company did pay for link farm nonsense.  They did not know better.  I suspect many of us dont know when our Doctor screws up.  We dont have the training.  A company 5 or 10 years ago paid for SEO and lazy SEO companies bought results on farms and got rich doing 1 hours work and charging $2k a month.  Matt basicly acknoledges this on the vid and basicly says he understands and you should work to clean it up.  Yes I know he says you made the mess so clean it up before you ask us to.  I get it.  I get it.  I hate it but I get it.

It's not a perfect world, I get that but since the rules changed I think Google should just let people disavow and not pay all this money to try and get these links removed.  That is my opinion.  Everyone has one......or 100...LOL

So you think companies that have backlinks placed on porn sites deserver what they get and should have to clean it up.  You think that is the responsibility of the reputable company that did nothing wrong.  Yes this company unknowingly participated in link farm nonsense but has not done sor for at least 5 years and is still gettting these links and they are not criminal.  They are hard working people that made a mistake.

Thasnks for the detailed anwers about your thoughts on the tool.

I guess what I will do is pick 20 of the really big scum bags from recent links and send an "Please ...Pretty please ...nice polite email and see what happens"  I will leave off the deserved PS: You scum bag....get a life.  It is just wrong....yea I know life is not fair.

[RyanKent]

Frankly the idea that a reputable company has to spend hard earned money asking people that boldly place a backlink on their site which were never requested is just wrong.

In 100% of cases I have seen, the company affected by the manipulative links is NOT reputable with respect to Google. To be clear, as I look to my penalized clients I do consider many of them to be reputable companies, but 100% of them have admitted they either knowingly built manipulative links, participated in some form of link scheme, or hired a SEO company who did such. Some clients share they had no idea what the SEO company was doing, but a reputable company needs to take accountability for the actions of their employees and those they decide to do business with.

I have seen companies claim to be attacked by competitors, but it is an exceptionally rare event. Mostly I find site owners who were unaware of the actions of a prior site owner, SEO, employee or who is simply not being honest.

Consider prior to 2012, negative seo via manipulative links hardly existed. Google only penalized a relatively miniscule number of sites for manipulative links in 2011. Why would anyone engage in an effort to penalize a competitor for manipulative links at a time when 99.9% of sites with manipulative links were able to get away with it? Yet if you look at the age of those manipulative links, you will likely find many are older than 2011.

Another consideration, over how long of a period of time were these links built? If you have a "good" site and then a sudden attack of negative SEO occurs, Google does not take any action. Rand proved this fact when he acquired millions of spammy links to SEOmoz earlier this year.

Again, it is not important what I believe but every indication shows this is what Google believes, and they are acting in this manner. Google has stated very clearly how the Disavow tool is to be used and it is clear many SEOs and site owners will disregard Google's advice which is fine. Keep in mind Google has already shared they will disregard Disavow submissions which they do not have confidence in.

Direct answers to your questions:

Do you think it is bad to list sites that might 404 but that show as 200 and ping but don’t pull up a site.

When I receive that result, I check the site with another browser. If I still receive the same result, the site is marked to check later. Keep in mind if you receive a 404 error today but the issue is resolved tomorrow, it will look to Google the same as if you skipped the site.

Will the site be penalized more for not figuring out which sites are currently active?

No. If you are going through this process your site is likely already penalized and/or impacted by Penguin. You will not be further penalized, but you are unlikely to have the current penalty removed if you miss active sites.

**I am inclined to simply disavow all sites that are not indexed in Google.  See anything wrong with that? **

You are rolling the dice. It depends on why a site is not indexed. Whatever the reason, if it is resolved and Google sees the link, your Reconsideration Request will likely be denied and/or the Penguin issue will remain.

Here is the bottom line. Manipulative link penalties are designed to suppress the rankings of sites who have taken shortcuts rather than do the work required to earn links. I hope we can agree on that much.

The type of site owner and SEO who takes these short cuts typically tries to remove their penalty in the fastest / cheapest / easiest manner possible (i.e. taking more shortcuts). That is why many site owners are still upset their penalty has lasted 6+ months and there is no sign of it being lifted anytime soon. Many are jumping at the Disavow tool announcement with a complete misunderstanding of how the tool works or whom it benefits.

You can complain about Google's earning revenue with AdWords. You can be upset about the penalties being unfair. You may have very valid points but the bottom line is....unless Google's requirements for dealing with these issues are satisfied the choices are:

a) go out of business (which many have done)

b) lay off employees (which many have done)

c) accept lower traffic / pay for AdWords or generate traffic in other ways

d) move sites

The process of going to each link and determining which are manipulative versus organic really sucks. The same for emailing 1000s of domains asking them to remove links. There is no way to sugar coat this work. It takes hundreds of hours of trained personnel and it is the most unrewarding task in SEO. You are not building anything but rather cleaning up internet garbage. Nevertheless the choice has been very clear for the past year....do it or choose one of the 4 options above.

I know these words are likely not going to be well received. But I also know it is better to share the cold hard truth then try to sugar coat the situation when people are facing layoffs and business closures.

Best Wishes.

[freestone]

Check out this vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

Just like SEO wtih even higher stakes.

[freestone]

Thanks for the long reply.  We can talk about this a long time but it is like polotics in that you bring your life experence tot he discussion.

Let’s talk about what I consider link stealing.  A company that links to you to harm or hold you for ransom.   I did hear Matt say you have to make effort to get them to unlink you but frankly the idea that a reputable company has to spend hard earned money asking people that boldly place a backlink on their site which were never requested is just wrong. It is web equivalent of a hit and run or a kidnapping.   After carefully looking at some of the backlinks just before April 2012 and lately I am pretty convinced that this site has been attacked by the competition.   Why would a Cech porn site like to a reputable USA only e-commerce site.  This company should not have to put money into requesting those links be removed.  Google should allow a company to just disavow this type of attack.

I will go back to my customer and let him decided but my inclination is to just make a list of the link stealer and disavow them.
So beyond this philosophical  conversation let’s talk about the disavow tool.  I know it is new and perhaps I should just ice this effort  for 3 weeks but:

1. Do you think it is bad to list sites that might 404 but that show as 200 and ping but don’t pull up a site.  Will the site be penalized more for not figuring out which sites are currently active?

2. I am inclined to simply disavow all sites that are not indexed in Google.  See anything wrong with that?  I have looked at 100s of them now and they are all just the type of site that is a blight to the internet.   Ironically most of them are sites that just serve up AdWords.  Well hypocritical is really a better word.

[RyanKent]

**As for contacting these irreputable scum bags.   No offence but that is a joke.  I am suppose to send emails to 1000s of these sites when they are just trash.  They will never take the link down and it will be a complete waste of time. **

Every week my team sends these emails and receives results. I have worked with dozens of sites resolving their manipulative link penalties. On the first site I worked with, 14% of the site owners we contacted removed their links. Since that time, we have greatly improved our success rate. While the rate varies from client to client, our most result results exceeded a 50% success rate of link removal.

If you perform the process correctly, it works very well. One example is sending a polite letter requesting the link(s) be removed rather than a threatening letter. A great tool which can help manage this process is Rmoov. To be clear, there is no "set it and forget it tool". It still requires a lot of work to manage responses from each site, but the Rmoov tool definitely helps.

I did hear him [Matt Cutts] say you are to contact these sites but come on....that is a joke...

If you sincerely believe those words there is nothing I can type to assist you. The head of Google's Spam Team shared a very clear and direct message and you feel it is a joke. Here is the bottom line. You, your company and employees are the ones who need to live with the results so you are free to decide what action you wish to take. Some site owners approach SEOs for assistance and 60 days later their penalty / algorithmic suppression is removed and they are back in business. Many clients choose to test various methods for a few months then later return and ask for service. That works too but then months of time, effort, money and lost sales are gone.

Personally, I am a service provider. I earn money from site owners who pay my agency to resolve their penalty issues, so feel free to consider me as a bias source of information. The challenge is any site owner is free to add links to the Disavow tool at any time, and Google knows it. They are also free to remove those links as well. That is why Google wants to see solid effort upfront.

With respect to the Disavow tool specifically, it is new to the SEO community and we are all using it and watching the results closely. As with anything else, you will see a wide variety or reports from various SEOs and site owners regarding their successes and failures with the tool. It takes 3-4 weeks for Google to recrawl the links uploaded to the tool, so we don't expect to see any tangible data for a few more weeks.

I encourage you to watch the first 2 minutes of Matt's video repeatedly. Listen to how his shares about 1:20 in the Disavow tool is only to be used after all attempts to contact a site owner has failed. We contact site owners via their WHOIS email, the email address on the site, the Contact Form from the site and more. We have chased down site owners via social media, called them on the phone and written letters. It all helps. These are my experiences which you are free to accept or ignore as you deem fit for your needs.

Best Wishes,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

[freestone]

Thanks for replying.  I have done extensive reading here on SEOmoz and I am aware of these concerns.

I am 100% sure this site was hit by  Penguin.  I watched the ranking drop in the 3 or 4 days folling Penguin.    Traffic is about 35% of what it was pre peguin. No webmaster message for Google.   I have worked extensively on on-page but this site is in trouble becuase of linking....well I am as sure as I can be....there is nothing 100% sure in SEO.

The link profile of this site sucks but it is a relevant ecommerce site and has decent traffic right up to Penguin..  Years ago the owner hired a couple of different Black Hat SEO's who just wanted his money so those links are still haunting the site.  Out of the 2534 backlink domains I have been able to identify about 1000 have no google indexed pages.  Yes I know that does not mean they are all bad but for sure about 1/2 of the backlinks to this site are hurting and not helping.

Recently created links are link farm silly stuff, even a Cech porn site   These make me think Bad SEO as we certainly did not ask for these links and the only reason any of thse links would have been create are either Bad SEO or a site that wants to charge to have the link removed.

As for contacting these irreputable scum bags.   No offence but that is a joke.  I am suppose to send emails to 1000s of these sites when they are just trash.  They will never take the link down and it will be a complete waste of time.

I do not plan to use the disavow indescremently.  That is why I am doing my homework and asking questions now.  I plan to make one list and then wait at least 1 month to see the results.

What I want to do is re-set the link profile of the site and then work on some decent back link building.  Don't you think the tool should be used for that.  I listened to Matt talk about this tool and it was clear to me that he indicated that you could distance yourslef from practices in the past you should not have been a part of .....that is what I want to do.

For this site there is also the question of it being under attack from competitors.  Take for example this site http://darwinsweb.com  Google shows that this site link to the site I am working on multiple times this month.  This site is PR 0 with one page ranked in Google (who know why).  This site is a virus and I did not ask to be on it and I will not write them and ask to be removed.  I want to tell google to not associate the site I am working with these type of scum bags.

Perhaps a better question to ask is what type of site should I not include in a disavow.

Like I said I found multiple domains that NetPeak shows all to the same IP address.  Should I include this or will Google already know about this type of nonsense and discount it.  Why should their be harm in telling google to not include a domain I know is harmful even if it is a dead site.

I heard Matt say you can use this tool as a bit of a reset button and that is what I am planning to do.  I did hear him say you are to contact these sites but come on....that is a joke...these sites I am talking about are so egregious they only exist as 1. black hat link farms, or 2. Bad SEO attack tools or 3. link randsome or all the above.   I can't believe Matt really thinks I should contact them.

With 35% of old traffic levels I have to do something meaningful.  Looking at the link profile there is litle doubt it is harmful.

[RyanKent]

The first question I would ask is...are you affected by a manual penalty or Penguin? If you are not affected by either, Google specifically shared you should NOT use the disavow tool.

The next question is, have you contacted each webmaster requesting link removal? The disavow tool is designed to be used only after you contacted each domain repeatedly. Google has been quite clear on this topic. They desire you to use all reasonable methods to contact site owners prior to using the disavow tool. They even stated some disavow files will not be trusted.

The bottom line...if you are impacted by a manual penalty then no short cut will help you. Google understands those impacted by a manual penalty for manipulative links attempted to cheat the system by taking shortcuts. They have clearly designed the penalty removal process to block all short cuts. Nevertheless, site owners and SEOs seem to continue to try which is why forums are full of posts like "I have submitted 10 Reconsideration Requests and all have been denied."

If you are impacted by Penguin, the Disavow tool MAY work but I suspect it either will not work, or work only temporarily. Google is specifically looking for a "significant" reduction in manipulative links pointing at your site. Keep in mind site owners can add and remove links to the disavow tool at any time. Accordingly, it is not designed to be used except as an absolutely last resort after every other possibility has been exhausted.