Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If anybody ends up searching for this topic please view this Whiteboard Friday with Rand. I think he actually ended up reading my question and answering it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3mxJnA8Zk

Thank you for the feedback everybody.

You all make good points. I'm not facing an active penalty and I'm just trying to be proactive. All the links were organic in nature and there is no indication that black-hat backlink building has been performed on the websites that I'm optimizing. I think that too many SEOs have used the Disavow Tool as a proactive measure so I don't believe that Google will set us up in a trap for using it. My thought process was that I want to start with technical SEO, get the sites healthy on the back-end then implement a content marketing strategy that's been in the works for some time.

That being said, I think that I'll hold off on the disavow until I gather more information or read up on studies that have been performed regarding proactive disavow. If anybody has any insight on this please post it here as I am sure would be appreciated by all.

Cheers

Hey everybody,

I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do?

For example:
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

and

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/17

Hey Aaron,

I agree that if I add spammy content to any page that it will hurt rankings because I'm adding content to just add content. However, I don't agree that simply by forcing the content to the top (as Google suggests we do in the official Google Blog mentioned above) that it will hurt rankings. Like I said, the only issue is that my manager thinks it is an eyesore. I do think that if it is well worded and good content that people will end up reading it and learning more about what the page is about. The only thing I want to know is if the official Google blog post is still relevant as it was written in 2012. Structure, Design and UX have changed a lot since then. How big of a factor is Content Above the Fold vs Below in 2015?

Many of our pages have the textual content stuffed at the bottom of the page because the manager doesn't think anybody reads it and it is an eyesore to have at the top: http://www.stevinsontoyotawest.com/schedule-service

For some light reading here is Google’s official blog talking about content quality:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html This references Ads vs Content showing above the fold. However, in our case it has to do with images vs ads and stuffing text at the bottom of pages.

Here is a bit of heavier reading. You can do a quick search for "Fold" to see their interpretation. 
http://macedynamics.com/research/content-quality-score/

I understand that images are still content, however hardly any of the images have Alt text and they are not even named with keywords so Google really can't distinguish what the page is about through images alone. I'm not about to go through the entire site and add Alt text and rename images because I have much more to do on my plate.

So, the questions is: Is stuffing content at the bottom of the page, below all images/inventory/widgets ok to do or should we stick with the eyesore content at the top of the page? Thoughts?

This depends on the type of company you're working on. If it is a local business (dentist/doctor/plumber, etc) then I would highly recommend building and cleaning up local citations with Bright Local or a similar platform.

This depends on the type of company you're working on. If it is a local business (dentist/doctor/plumber, etc) then I would highly recommend building and cleaning up local citations with Bright Local or a similar platform.

Hey everybody,

I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do?

For example:
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

and

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/17

Hey Aaron,

I agree that if I add spammy content to any page that it will hurt rankings because I'm adding content to just add content. However, I don't agree that simply by forcing the content to the top (as Google suggests we do in the official Google Blog mentioned above) that it will hurt rankings. Like I said, the only issue is that my manager thinks it is an eyesore. I do think that if it is well worded and good content that people will end up reading it and learning more about what the page is about. The only thing I want to know is if the official Google blog post is still relevant as it was written in 2012. Structure, Design and UX have changed a lot since then. How big of a factor is Content Above the Fold vs Below in 2015?