Disavow without penalty

[unirmk]

Hi fellow Mozians,

I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on.

I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm.

However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have  a penalty.

This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts.

This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc

It seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution.

If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks indeed.

watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc

[unirmk]

Thanks for the help everyone!

[Yoav-Blustein]

Hi!

As others above me stated, it is perfectly fine to use disavow tool regardless to penalties, in my niches we tend to get a lot of negative SEO efforts against our sites, mostly from adult and pharmaceutical-remedies type of rubbish sites.

But again, it is a wild-wild expertise area where most of us has fixations including me

good luck..

[Deacyde]

Google has said you can disavow anytime, disavowing is only telling google that you want these backlinks to be nofollow and not pass any linkjuice so they wont help or harm you.

You don't need to be penalized to use the disavow tool, you merely need to have backlinks or domains to add to the disavow file.

It's common for SEOs to disavow urls / domains monthly, however most will tell you to do an audit yearly and keep up on new backlinks as they come in.

I've used the disavow tool but before I did, I did about a few weeks research into what it means to disavow and why one would disavow as well as how to properly disavow. No where did I read you only use the disavow tool if you have a penalty, especially since if you were hit by penguin you wouldn't really know, so Google had to leave the door open on that one.

[KevnJr]

I felt similar inasmuch as how often to disavow. My research show if you have been penalized disavow regularly, if not then annually with some monitoring is fine. Pre-Emptive disavow seems slightly proactive, I only disavow 3 to 5 bad links after 6 months.

Hope this helped

KJr