Disavow - Broken links

[lauratagdigital]

I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site.

http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/

When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with  a more positive approach.

I just wondered what the consensus was?

[jesse-landry]

links that don't exist or links to pages that don't exist?

..heck, either way i'd ignore them and focus on phase 2 of your plan. Disavow seems to be a bit overused in my opinion. It's more of a last-ditch effort for penalty recovery IMHO.

and if it's 404 errors you're trying to fix: Google will eventually stop following those after they 404 long enough. Don't even worry about it. (unless they're links you want, then put a relevant redirect in place.)

Hope this was helpful.

[TomRayner]

I think if the links are broken and Google has been made aware of such, ie it has recrawled and cached the page (simply add "cache:" in front of the URL for the last cache copy - if the URL itself is broken, check if it is still indexed in Google), then it would know that the link has been broken and shouldn't count it.

If that's the case, I don't think the disavow would have any benefit, unless of course if the link were to return, which could be a possibility.

If the page is cached and that cached version has got the broken version = no worries.

If the URL is broken and the page is no longer indexed = no worries.

If the URL is broken and still indexed = check to see if any other links point to that URL (including the URLs site navigation and/or sitemap, if applicable.  If not, should deindex soon.  If there are links, I'd disavow.

Just my two pennies, hope it helps!

[Mike_Davis]

I think that the better tactic would be to create new content for those broken links.  Unless these links are located on a very bad domain (link farm, etc.), I would just create a new page.

Be careful before you start messing with the disavow tool.  The only time I would use the disavow tool is if the link is obviously bad.  Like obviously obviously bad (if that makes sense).  Many people assume that their ranking tanked because of some algo update and start disavowing links without really checking into it.  Just be careful before using that tool and research the hell out of the link before you throw it away.

Here is a good article that gives you the Do's and Don't of using the Disavow tool.

http://www.portent.com/blog/seo/google-disavow-links-tool-best-practices.htm

Good luck!

[lauratagdigital]

Thanks everyone.

Well this is an example http://www.hotmarketable4you.com/SpecialReports/PRE30141.html

I had checked lots of these links maybe 2 weeks ago and then had (poor) content on them - but now all seem to be broken so i suspect was a link farm.

And Mike - was more irrelevant rather than "bad" content

Think I'll build links over next few weeks and then evaluate where we are then - hopefully rankings will start to improve