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So there's no way I could type out my thoughts / questions. If you're bored, have a cup of coffee and some oreos, and are interested in a strange situation that I can't figure out the solution to, I'd appreciate your input:
I should note ahead of time: It really is important to me to do things "by the book" and "to the letter" with SEO. So while there may be some gray areas, I would like to really do the one thing that is BEST in this situation. Thanks for any input.
I feel like you're still not answering my question.
Going by your logic, any link building at all is "Manipulative". Technically, isn't it? Yes.
My question, once again, is whether links containing anchor text are inherently bad.
That was the question: Are they INHERENTLY bad.
I gave two options based on the question:
1) They are inherently Bad
2) They are possibly Good
I posed my question in a very deliberate way. I will repeat the original post so maybe its more clear what I am saying: I have been told that ANY ANCHOR TEXT LINKS ARE BAD.
Any. All.
But I found an example of obvious spam using anchor text links, and we rank well for those.
Therefore: Is ANY (ALL) Anchor text linking bad? (Yes / No)
Since you haven't said a simple yes or no, Im going to go with "NO" anchor text links are not inherently bad and in fact seem to be a very effective way to rank well ... IF ... (this was obvious, and a given) its used responsibly and in moderation.
So the direct answer to the question in bold above, is ........?
1) I've been told that other sites linking to my site with keyword-rich text are bad.
2) But Google Console / Analytics shows that we rank extremely high for random, pointless phrases loosely tied to the topic of our site. Like "dht blocker". (its a hair loss site)
3) This week I began analyzing our backlinks. Guess what I found? Literally hundreds of bot-created spammy trackback and pingback text links around the phrase "dht blocker"
It seems to me that keyword rich anchor text on external sites is NOT a bad thing. In fact its an outstanding way to rank better for your desired keywords. Obviously the "bad" is the spam element. Probably the high quantity. On unrelated websites. But guess what? It worked. _We are ranking extremely well for these pointless phrases, thanks to these spam bots. _
Obviously we will be disavowing all these sites. But I want to start building quality links via legitimate, honest means.
So here is my question:
If I begin a legitimate honest link building campaign with other websites, and request that they put the HREF around our most coveted keyword phrase - is this inherently BAD? Or is it actually possibly GOOD? -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts?
Thank you so much. So that leaves the most important question. How do I know if these are benefiting me? I really can't afford to lose rankings right now, as we are in this situation due to already ruined rankings for an unknown reason. There are about 300 of them total. We have roughly 2,000 unique domains linking to us. So its a decent chunk.
Ironically their domain authority is "44" and mine is "45" .... the site has been online 16 years (with nary a design update apparently) ... their Moz domain authority is 37 whereas mine is 38. So ... I'm not sure if these guys are viewed terribly by Google or not...
There must be some way to ascertain what Google thinks of this site and its links... ?
Not sure how to handle this one. Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ...
Just a quick 3 minute video explanation: https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E
I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in.
Thanks.
My understanding is that this information is wrong. If you are dealing with an obviously spammy website that has no value or real content, you are supposed to disavow the root domain. As per Matt Cutts: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-machete-16844.html
One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That's one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.
Obviously you don't want to disavow an entire domain if the domain itself is a legit website. That is just basic common sense. But a universal rule that you "must point to the exact link" is factually false. Just like a rule that you "must disavow the root domain" would be factually false. You look at each link and make a decision how to proceed.
So my question was about root domain disavows. I gave some examples above.
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When looking at my backlinks if I see something like this:
www.domainPizza.net
www.domainPizza.com
sub.domainPizza.com
www.domainpizza.org
domainPizza.net
https://domainpizza.com
https://www.domainpizza.net
What is the actual list of disavows that I put into the file if I want to disavow this domain? I am seeing so many variations of the same domain.
Thank you.
Wow! Thank you so much for such a comprehensive and thoughtful reply.
You're right, its on a very old CMS system, and not only does it not have an XML sitemap, but I'm certain there are duplicate content issues, improper pages being indexed (contact, member list, etc) and a hundred other issues. This process of cleaning up the site and upgrading it has resulted in us finding mass quantities of the above issues due to these very old CMS systems that were made prior to "duplicate content" and other things being an issue.
I will take all your recommendations to heart and get started right away.
Only way to explain this was to make a video.
Would love everyone's input on this:
https://youtu.be/TcdaOvz24Aw
Thank you.
I am 100% new to the world of WordPress, more advanced CMS systems, and all the interesting things that have been developed over the last several years on the web.
After installing WordPress I noticed options to allow pingbacks and trackbacks. Upon researching these, I found it interesting that you can very quickly and easily identify spam wordpress blog sites that mention your article in a spammy fashion if you leave this option ENABLED. Because you literally get a notification of new nonsense happening on the web that may affect you.
Is this a logical, rational thing to leave enabled and use as one of many tricks to manage new additions to a disavow file? It almost seems like a Godsend because you don't have to go looking for them.
Yes. We have confirmed with Sucuri that there was a concerted, intentional spam campaign against our site in 2013 that has since destroyed our rankings. Though Google hasn't given us any warnings, Sucuri had us on a blacklist because of it, and was kind enough to remove us without any cost or obligation on our part to sign up. They also provided us with a list of some of the most offending links so I could disavow them.
With up to 70,000 total, I am confident there are more, and to be honest, I see no reason to "leave some". Or leave any. I believe Google's warning should focus on this part: "...if used incorrectly". That means ... simply use it correctly. And disavow bad links, period. That's my take at least. 
I have a website with nearly 70,000 incoming links, since its a somewhat large site that has been online for 19 years.
The rate I was quoted for a link audit from a reputable SEO professional was $2 per, and clearly I don't have $140,000 to spend on a link audit !!
I was thinking of asking you guys for a tutorial that is the Gold Standard for link auditing checklists - and do it myself. But then I thought maybe its easier to shorten the list by knocking out all the "obviously good" links first. My only concern is that I be 100% certain they are good links.
Is there an "easiest approach" to take for shortening this list, so I can give it to a professional to handle the rest?
After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation.
We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone. No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google. But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all.
A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users.
We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google. We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers. I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles. People can comment there as well if they like.
Are there any potential downsides to doing this? My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings.
Thank you.
Update:
In addition to the following happening on our /shop/ subdomain (the bread and butter of the site):
1) Stupidly moving it to shop.domain.com for 2 months, redirecting everything there, then deciding to move it back to domain.com/shop/ ....
2) Developer failing to enable canonicals resulting in the new shop install having 4+ duplicate pages for every product for about 5 months.
I have now found that the default setting for Magento store software is a 302 redirect for the 'Auto-redirect base URL' option. Our base URL changed from HTTP to HTTPS. This means that probably for about the last 9 months, our store home page has been 302'd (no link juice passing, and way too long to use a temporary flag like this).
This 302 is Magento's default option, and my developer failed to point out the devastating effect it could have on rankings if we didn't change it to "301".
Not sure if this has played a role in our lost rankings, as our store is just a sub-section of our site, and I have no idea how I am going to fix this and tell Google "Wait! Here's a 301 instead! Please restore our juice!" 
We haven't submitted the Disavow yet. Im literally about to upload it today.
Thank you for those graphs. One comment on the first graph showing the major drop in 2012. This was also about the time that Google started changing things up in search results. It was in 2012 that I began seeing the following changes:
By mid 2013 we were halfway down Page 2, mostly replaced with sponsored ads, empty-content (but reputable) medical sites, and random news articles that would come and go on a weekly basis.
I remember this time period well because I was so upset by the choices Google was making. They all seemed to drastically degrade the search results quality for our key search phrase. I wasn't the only site that was getting pushed away either. There were at least 4 other hair loss sites that were just outstanding content-wise. Both quality, breadth, and depth, and they all dropped like flies.
We managed to hang on to Page 2 for another year or two. But as I pointed out above: **Our Home page and core content is completely gone from Google now. 99% of our traffic is coming from the forum rankings. With that, we see about 99 users in real time. Without it, the number drops to "2". **
"Do you know if any link-building has been done?" Tell me if this would qualify. I also run a couple other fairly decent ranking websites on the topic of hair loss / alopecia. One has a forum with several hundred thousand URLs also. At one point I put a link to HLT in the header of the other websites forums. It was an image link, but it resulted in tens of thousands of links to HLT from that one domain. I did the same thing on another domain I own that is a little less popular. In fact when the disavow guys were looking at my current incoming links, they found that 80% of the tens of thousands of links were coming from two sites - these two. I explicitly asked them if this move on my part could've caused damage to my rankings. They didn't seem to think so, unless it was a keyword-rich anchor text link. (something like that).
_Do you think this did maybe some Penguin damage? Three days ago I removed all links to HLT from those sites. Instead I placed a single image link to HLT on both of those sites home pages, and nowhere else. _
"Any dates where Google may have hit you with a penalty"
Unfortunately we only had Analytics tracking on the home page, going back roughly 5 years. From that, and apparently some tools these guys have access to, they see no major problems in traffic or ranking drops. They did note a noticeable drop after a Panda release back in mid 2012, but then a recovery immediately after the next Panda update. Aside from that, the data is limited.
I know we've made some big mistakes in the meantime. When I found out that Google required mobile functionality on sites, I signed up with a service that auto-converts your site to mobile and throws it on an m.domain.com subdomain. So for roughly 4 months in 2105, my whole (mobile) site was sitting on a subdomain that never existed before, and was a train wreck visually. Broken links, bad formatting, but it worked in Mobile and Google acknowledged our mobile issues had been fixed. I believe this was a very bad move on my part, adding a random subdomain alongside the main site being at www still.
When trying to fix the store as I mentioned, my developer forgot to enable canonicals, so the whole store had 4-6 duplicate pages for everything, and that sat, undiscovered from Nov 2015 to about April 2016. In that time, the store traffic absolutely tanked.
That being said: 99.9% of our current traffic is coming into the forums. With that, we are seeing an average of 100 users in "real-time". Without that, it drops to 2. The home page and rest of the site are absolutely gone from Google.
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases.
I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for.
For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic.
Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long.
Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either.
Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016:
Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's.
News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's.
Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's.
Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's.
Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero.
Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd.
Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd.
Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL.
Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work!
After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday.
Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site
Cleaned up Google Search Console fully
Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there.
Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised.
Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts.
Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media.
Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?"
**Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years.
That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems.
I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.