Some people hate the concept of disavowing the links and will never do it. Others embrace it and overuse it. I personally feel that disavowing links rarely is enough to fix the problem (assuming you have done proper research and found poison links).

Grossly oversimplified explanation from my personal experience - imagine you have 100 links boosting your rankings and each link gives you 1 ranking point. Google says 20 are bad links so they penalize you. If you disavow those 20 links, your rankings don't jump back up because your ranking score is only 80 and it used to be 100. You removed the poison but your rankings are still weak until you replace the lost link power with healthy new links.

Thanks for the reply but I'm not sure I totally follow. Are you essentially saying that disavowing is a good tactic to do along with link building or that it's pointless to disavow links because it won;t have much of an effect on rankings?

The usual approach is to try to identify which backlinks, if any, might have caused a penalty, or might cause a penalty in the future.

So the first step is to study the subject of which types of backlinks might cause a penalty and learn to identify them. This is a fairly complicated subject, and unless you acquire a good knowledge of it, you should probably avoid using the disavow tool.

So after properly studying the subject, as well as your indiviual situation, you make a judgement about what to do. Every case is different, and there will always be some uncertainty.

Thanks for the comments. I guess my knowledge of the disavow tool isn't advanced enough. If there are duplicates of my content out there, with links leading back to my domain, w/out any kind of canonicalization or bot blocking should those be disavowed?

If there are duplicates of my content out there, with links leading back to my domain, w/out any kind of canonicalization or bot blocking should those be disavowed?

That sounds similar to the situation with several of my own sites, and as far as I know, none of them have ever been harmed by it. But as I mentioned, every case is different. For example, it could depend on the site's overall backlink profile, and how natural it looks, in other words the overall picture.

You might want to read what Google says about bad links and the use of the disavow tool [support.google.com].

Of course, most folks who get in trouble with the tool ignore the very prominent warning:

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

I have yet to use the disavow tool. To date I have seen no problems by going that route. In general I am opposed to doing g's work for them (identifying spammy links) without a paycheck for the work involved.

I have been struggling with "should I or shouldn't I" disavow lately.

My site has an extremely strong, natural link profile, however, in the 10 years I've had it, there are a good number of "low quality" sites linking to me - it would be a pretty big project to go through and disavow all of them.

I know that most sites over time collect a lot of garbage, along with the good.

I guess the question is - if you have a site that is 'naturally' strong enough, will google be able to ignore all of those crap links that come in naturally too?

Reversing the effects of manipulation is the driving force behind this tool... Manipulation via external links implies unnatural link anchors that induce "unearned ranks".

Without the ranks this tool does nothing. If you have unearned ranks, disavow the links that induced those ranks are your target.

Re-phrased - only links that aided ranks can be deemed manipulative!

I guess the question is - if you have a site that is 'naturally' strong enough, will google be able to ignore all of those crap links that come in naturally too?

@besnette ... All websites have crap links pointing to them, since you have zero control over what others do, all you can do is control what you do.

In fact, what others do are your 'friends' for the most part, especially if you are indeed actually link building or somewhat violating Google's Guidelines by creating artificial links (unnatural links) where you crafted a really nice link anchor that is meant to tweak your ranks. The more CRAP you have, the more CAMOUFLAGE you have (meaning the more lightweight webspam you can do since PENGUIN isn’t all that granular nor are researching competitors that can easily report your self-created link webspam).

If you ARE NOT intentionally violating Google's Guideline by way of link manipulation e.g. [google.com...] as noted here:

Unnatural links to a site
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive or manipulative links pointing to the site. These may be the result of buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

You have nothing to worry about.

If you are indeed doing what Google suggests is UNNATURAL the more stuff that doesn't resemble your UNNATURAL STUFF but less risk there is.

That's the first point.

Every link that doesn't use the rel="nofollow" micro-expression passes PageRank. A link passing PageRank is not UNNATURAL, in and of itself, therefore it must start off being a NATURAL link until there is a detectable pattern. Only then will said link be seen as UNNATURAL.

DISAVOWING NATURAL LINKS reduces PageRank to your domain... Which will have a negative impact.

In most instances that negative impact will be a miniscule amount but it will be a negative impact none-the-less.

fathom -- Some members of WebmasterWorld have said that they use the disavow tool to try to protect their sites from negative SEO attacks by competitors.

For example, one of your competitors could build artificial (unnatural) backlinks to your site, but Google's algorithm might blame you for it, since In most cases there's no way for Google to reliably determine who built them.

The ONLY links, external to your domain that risk being detected as UNNATURAL whether you created them or someone else did (with or without your permission) have a pattern associated with your keyphrases.

You are absolutely correct whether you created the keyphrase links or someone else did or the combined sources of yours plus a competitor, these indeed would get devalued but if the PageRank of the domain is predominantly from natural links like brand, URLs and/or call-to-action links thus ranks are produced naturally Google algorithms will never harm you.

If your ranks are predominantly based on UNNATURAL patterns to begin with you certainly do have something to worry about but if you fix your own self-created UNNATURAL LINKS that curbs all linking issues.

The OP didn't provide any specifics (my first comment covered that).

Basnette did provide specifics (my second comment covered that).

I really thought we were done with these kinds of discussions. Disavow is a tool provided by Google which allows a site owner to effectively put a "no follow" on links pointing to their site.

Normally, a site owner doesn't need to worry about no-following inbound links because Google does tend to disregard links where there isn't a thematic/conceptual flow from one site to another. But sometimes, other sites will link to a valid site in an attempt to present their site as a valid web resource. When you are linked from these "other sites", it's keyphrase specific and could quite easily be interpreted by an algorithm as "spam".

@fathom
Maybe it's just me, but most of your posts I find really difficult to interpret. Not because it's a different language, but more "What's the frequency, Kenneth?".