To Disavow or Not to Disavow - that is the Question!

[Llanero]

I have had two SEO 'specialists' look at my site after the 2012 Penguin update as I was hit badly for one very important keyword. I took off any bad sites links but I never did anything with inbound links.

• One says my link profile is fine and do NOT use the disavow tool but I should improve my site (landing pages, content, photos, put blog on site, articles, social media etc etc). This I tried for several months but my site never improved.

• the second 'expert' said I HAVE to take certain ones off and he identified inbound links from spammy sites. He found links from 65 links from malware/untrusted sites and 267 from spam articles and 124 from link farms plus hundreds more from pages that no longer exist or never provide traffic

What would you do? i should point out  the anchor text for these inbound links is the one keyword that is the most important to the site and the one that got hit by the Penguin 2012

[Llanero]

I am thinking that maybe my best action is to take the first 65 (that are very untrusted sites/malware) and see if get anywhere with http://www.removeem.com/

The thing is .. SOMETHING must be preventing me from getting my raking back (as I have made such a huge effort with content, social media etc etc)

[Highland]

You need to understand that the disavow links tool is like fighting dandelions with a flamethrower. If you're going to do it, you need to be aware that you could get rid of your weed problem... as well as the rest of your yard.

I've had people definitively tell me that unless you have a Webmaster Tools message (manual penalty) you shouldn't touch it. And I've had others say, anecdotally, that the disavow tool fixed all their problems.

Here's my rules for anyone considering even touching this tool

1. Do a full backlink analysis. Use ahrefs and open site explorer in concert. Look for spam patterns.
2. Once you've found patterns of links that look suspicious, do your best to see if they are passing you any rank for your phrase. In one case, the phrase was so niche I could search it and still verify we held rank for it
3. If you still want to go forward, start only with the links that are obvious spam and MOVE SLOWLY. Nuke a few bad links and wait. If nothing, move on.and nuke a few more. If you have any doubts about a link, leave it.

If you take it slow you should be able to determine if your efforts are the reason for any recovery you see. I would NOT drop all 400 links at once.