Disavow a big part of my external link profile

[Midleton]

Hi There,

With the latest penguin 3.0 algorithm update (on October 17th,) I noticed a drop in my rankings. Even though I didn’t receive any manual penalty because no messages have been found in WebMaster Tool, I suspect it is an algorithm penalty. For this reason, I definitively decided to clean-up my external link profile. **I am excluding it is a Panda 4.1 penalty because an extensive site structure review has been conducted quite recently.

I collected external links from Webmaster Tool and Open Site Explorer.

What I found is that 83% of my external links need to be disavowed because the links come either from poor directories or marketing articles that are evidently and specifically written for link building purposes.

My questions are:

1)       Shall an external link clean-up be set in place anyway although I didn’t receive any penalty message in order to prevent future problems with penguin algorithm?

2)       Is it too dangerous to disavow 83% of external links? May such a manoeuvre destroy my actual rankings?

Thanks in advance for you advices

[Kingof5]

1. Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing

2. It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.

[Midleton]

Thanks a lot for your answer!! Very helpful

Another couple of questions if you don't mind J

1. Do you recommend to get new and healthy links before disavowing or go straight with the "cleansing"?

2. I read that before disavowing I should ask the web page owners to remove (nofollow) the bad link pointing at my site. I find such a procedure not only tedious but also quite useless because we all know that just a very small amount of the site owners would actually complete the task. Shall I in any case follow the process or I might directly disavow?

[Kingof5]

1. Yes - clean now before you're penalized again

2. I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.

Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.