Disavow data for non-manual penalty
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I'm working on cleaning link profile for a client. He has lots of crappy links pointing to his site. I tried to contact site owners so that they remove those links. No go for the most part. Since it's not a manual penalty, there's no need to specify when exactly I tried to contact those site owners, add emails to my disavow file, etc. It's my understanding that it's OK to just add domains to Google's disavow tool to submit because there was no manual action and it won't be checked by a human being. Would that be the right way to go?
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If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed.
I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.
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You are making the right move for the future. You can always remove something from the disavow later and it will simply be treated as a dofollow link again once the disavow file has been re-crawled and the page re-indexed. So no big deal, that process is fast if its not a crappy deep link.
There will be a Penguin update in the next few weeks according to John Mueller at Google. So any disavow effort now will be fruitless for the next update but still worth doing for the futire as the latest data sample for it has already been taken as reported by Gary Illyes here http://www.thesempost.com/penguin-possibly-next-week-late-disavow-links-next-update/
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that's the hardest penalty to recover from lol. You never know if you have done enough.
The last time I did it (i just got one to recover recently) I just flat out disavowed all those links. I made sure I got everything, even included yandex results.
I also made "for panda only" improvements.
It worked without talking or emailing anyone.
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Well if you believe you have an algorithmic penalty then I'd say yes. Otherwise a proactive disavow is controversial but generally seems to be thought to be fine. Of course it can effect rankings so you need to vet the links carefully. It is also possible that although you don't have a manual penalty now, you might in the future. So it is a good practice to keep the records of the removal request emails in case you will have to respond to a manual penalty. There are some great tools out there to help like RMOOV which I have used successfully.
But I'd get on that disavow quickly if I were suffering from a Penguin thing since an update could come soon.
Also it's important to know if the links were paid for or the results of a previous "SEO" company. In that case I would definitely want to keep a record of the removal emails, just in case.
Best
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