Best to Leave Toxic Links or Remove/Disovow on Site with Low Number of Linking Domains

[Kingalan1]

Our site has only 87 referring domains (with at least 7,100 incoming links). LinkDetox has identified 29% of our back links as being toxic and 14% as being questionable. Virtually all of these links derive from spammy sites.

We never received a manual penalty, but ever since the first Penguin penalty in 2012 our search volume and ranking has dropped with some uneven recover in the last 3 years.

By removing/disavowing toxic links are we risking that over optimized link text will be removed and that ranking will suffer as a result? Are we potentially shooting ourselves in the foot? Would we be better to spend a few months building quality links from reputable domains before removing disavowing bad links? Or toxic links (as defined by LinkDetox) so bad that it should be a priority to remove them immediately before taking any other step?

Thanks, Alan

[LauraSultan]

If your site has in fact been negatively impacted by Penguin, you'll have to wait for the next Penguin refresh for your changes to have an impact. You may see fluctuations due to other algorithm changes though.

http://searchengineland.com/google-says-the-penguin-panda-algorithms-still-require-manual-data-pushes-218212

[Kingalan1]

That is reassuring!!! My concern is that the number of domains that link to our site is so low (less than 100) that evening removing low quality links could be a negative.

In terms of seeing a ranking/traffic improvement, do you think we could expect it once the links are removed/disavowed or do you think it would occur only upon a Penguin update?

Thanks!!! Alan

[LauraSultan]

Toxic, spammy links can only hurt you, but they are even more harmful if they make up a large percentage of your total backlinks. Remove/disavow them as soon as possible and work on earning legitimate, high-value backlinks. Also, over-optimized link text can be harmful as well.