Old Spammy Backlinks but No Manual Penalty...No Results

[bluelynxmarketing]

We have taken over a site in which the client had unfortunately hired an SEO consultant who bought bad comment spam links.  Webmaster Tools does not show a manual penalty of any kind but clearly this was bad practice from the former "SEO" consultant.  I believe we have a good structure of the completely new website we have built for the client but I am not sure of the best way to reduce any negative fallout from the previous actions.

I've read conflicting information about submitting disavow report to Google for the comment spam links.  In some cases, I have read that it would be irrelevant since there is not a manual penalty.  I am fairly certain rankings are being negatively effected from this action and looking for the best way to neutralize the algorithmic penalty.

Not sure if this helps or not but I use GWMT "Download Latest Links" and see that the soonest Google discovered one of these links is 4/4/2013.  Most of the links were generated some time during 2012.

How do you even begin to try to reach out and have comment spam manually removed...when most of the sites that allowed the comment spam to begin with are spam sites themselves?

[MonicaOConnor]

Without looking at the links specifically it is hard to speculate. Realistically the site made it through all Penguin updates unharmed. That has to say something. Disavowing the links will have a negative affect on SEO. It will take time to come back from it. It is expensive and time consuming. I would pose the options to your client and see what they decide. Pros and Cons of both options and let them decide.

[bluelynxmarketing]

Monica and Sheena,

Thank you for the responses.

We are working on producing new, good, quality content.

Monica, the problem is that these sites are pretty much abandoned spam sites, many of them not even in English.  Finding the actual webmaster and communicating with them is a very difficullt, if not impossible task.  In most cases, these spam links are in the form of comment spam.

[MonicaOConnor]

Have you reached out to the Webmasters first? I know it seems silly, but it would be better than a disavow action. Refreshing the link profile would be really helpful too, like Sheena said, having high quality links from content.

I would not recommend a disavow action be the first step. I would try to remove the links first, because you can't be 100% certain that is what is causing the ranking problems for the site.

[Sheena_Schleicher]

All good points you're making here. Unfortunately, there isn't a consensus on whether it's best to use the tool or not. I fall into the category of SEOs who disavow obvious spam/low quality links even without any manual penalty notification... I feel it's the honest thing to do & also don't like the idea of waiting for Google to really penalize the site. I then focus on creating unique, engaging, possibly long-format content pieces that the audience will love & share (building up authentic, high quality, contextually-relevant links that support on-site optimization & outnumber/overshadow any residual low quality links).

This Moz post walks through some critical steps for using the tool: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool