Disavow backlinks

[seoman10]

Is there any benefit in requesting manual removal over using the Google disavow file?  Or is it just extra work for little result.

I.e. is it better to just disavow straightaway and not mess around?

Thanks

[TomRayner]

Hey

At the very least, if you're removing links to try and revoke a manual penalty, showing evidence that you have directly contacted webmasters and had some links manually removed is essential.

Google wants to see you repent attempt to take action against your action.  I have not seen one manual penalty removed just by disavowing links straight away.  They want to see a documentation of your work, which includes manual outreach.

There is also the possible argument that physically removing a link will be 'quicker' at getting the link out of your backlink profile, with it being reported that a disavow file can take between 3-9 months to be processed.  Wouldn't surprise me if Google are trying to speed this up dramatically - but we know that Google crawls, caches and indexes links relatively quickly - and by that same notion it would also process removed/broken links quickly as well.  So there could be an advantage there too.

Hope this helps.