Should I disavow spammy links that are showing in Open Site Explorer but not showing in Google Webmaster Tools?

[wh-seo]

Howdy Mozzers,

After carrying out a backlink audit for a client, Open Site Explorer shows a range of outrageously spammy links for guys wanting a bit of assistance in the bedroom area, and so on.

Hopping over to Google Webmaster Tools, there is no reported trace of said spammy links (for either of the www/non-www versions of the site).  There are also no manual webspam actions found on the www/non-www Google Webmaster Tools accounts for this website.

So my question is: do I carry out a pre-emptive strike and go down the disavow process of requesting removal from the spammy sites, and then submit a disavow request to Google after allowing a suitable period of time for the junky/compromised website to (not) respond?

Or do I just leave it alone?

Thanks in advance for your wise words of wisdom and pearls of clarity.

[wh-seo]

Thanks for your feedback Ryan - much appreciated.

[RyanPurkey]

You're welcome Sara. I'm leaning towards no penalty associated currently, but you'll want to use your judgment. Things like percentage of spam to reputable links, whether or not the client is showing up for branded searches, number of pages listed via the 'site:' search, and so on.  If they don't appear to be penalized and are competing about where to be expected then these links likely aren't affecting them.

GWT doesn't guarantee showing all backlinks, so yes, it is a possibility that you won't find them there. You can use other backlink checking tools like Majestic and Ahrefs to compile an even larger list, while a site like https://www.rmoov.com/ can help with speeding up the cleaning process.

Finally, it'd probably be instructive for you to run several sites through OSE and see how much spam is common place so that you can start to get a feel for it. Much is from content scrapers that are linking unintentionally, things of that nature.  Google knows to ignore them for the most part.

[wh-seo]

Thanks for your response Ryan.

So do you think that if the links haven't been flagged yet, then perhaps Google is already ignoring them, with no penalty associated?

If there's a possibility of a penalty (even a minor one that isn't big enough to be listed as a manual webspam action), then I'd probably pick the disavow route, however is it possible to disavow links that aren't showing up in GWT?

[RyanPurkey]

That those links aren't showing up in your GWT profile is a pretty good indicator that there's already some awareness on Google's end about the quality of the domain and/or pages with those links.  And it sounds like you've already read through their official guide on disavow here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487 as well as reading up in other places (The history of spam page is kind of neat: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html). It mostly comes down to a work / insurance cost measurement.

• High effort: Finding contact information and emailing each spam link. Reward: None, until a manual action is initiated and the contact efforts are requested. Risk: Minimal, but you are emailing a spammer.
• Medium / Low effort: Finding contact information on the top ten offenders, and emailing them. Reward: Again, none until a manual action takes place, but at least you can show some effort on your part from YYYY-MM-DD date (insurance). Risk: Same.
• Medium / Low effort: Creating a disavow list per Google's instructions and sending it in. Reward: Little to none. Your rankings and site appear to be fine at the moment. Risk: The list deletes something Google doesn't consider spam and your rankings suffer, or some other issue related to using the tool.

Hopefully that helps with some clarity. If your site is growing well in referral traffic and links from legitimate sites and that's the biggest percentage of your link profile, you're probably fine.