Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links

[blagger]

Hey Everyone,

Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as

"This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa"

"Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes"

"The organs in the female reproductive system incl"

The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server

3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed.

So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us

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| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 |

If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner.

We have 268 of these links from 200 domains.

Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc.

I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool?

Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem.

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[blagger]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for that. I figured as I hadn't received any emails from Google that it shouldn't be a problem.

Cheers

[Mike.Goracke]

This has been a much debated topic over the last few weeks.

According to Google Webmaster Tools regarding the disavow tool, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

So as you can see, most sites shouldn't need this tool. If you have thousands of spammy links coming from one source, with keyword heavy anchor text, that could look bad to Google; however, you are more or less averaging 1 link for 200 different domains. As long as that anchor text is unique (even if it doesn't completely make sense) you "should" be fine.

This article from Search Engine Land, 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links, states "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

You say, "Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process..." Google actually recommends you contact the site owners first and make an attempt at doing everything in your power to request your links get removed prior to using the disavow tool if you choose to do so.

Long story short. With that few links coming from that many unique domains, AND the fact that you haven't received a warning from Google... I would be tempted to just leave things and evaluate the keywords you were previously ranking for. If you see that it has been a straight up nose dive in rankings, there may be some concern, but fluctuation in rankings (at least for me) is relatively normal. In the course of a week, I can be high on page 2 or on page 5 (I have extremely competitive keywords) - I have come to expect this type of fluctuation, because I always rise to the top eventually.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Mike