Document download sites linking to my site. Should I disavow?

[wordsyouwant]

I downloaded my links through the Google Webmaster site and I have a number of new links that appear to be coming from document download sites. They have basically taken my PDFs and have them to where they can be downloaded. They are also linking back to my site and creating what I feel are sketchy links. I don't actually want traffic coming to these PDFs. They are basically sample articles for my writing company and it's just a portfolio.

Here's one of the links:

http://www.give-me-doc.com/Trailer-Brake-Types.pdf

So, what or can I do about them? Should I disavow them?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Valerie

[LesleyPaone]

The very broad rule that I follow is that if you did not create the link, disavow it. That does not work in all situations though, especially if someone notable is quoting an article or your site. The next rule I look at is if it seems useful, or it seems like it is just scraped content for SEO. If it is actually a useful site and a useful link, I would not disavow it. One metric that you can use is if there is actually traffic from the link. On scrape sites there is never any usually link traffic, but with useful links you will get some traffic.

Also on a side note I would consider DMCA'ing them on taking down the PDF's.

[MoosaHemani]

The rule I following when auditing my link profile is to see if the link in my opinion cannot drive any quality traffic back to my site, it’s probably worthless. If you didn’t want the traffic from these sites that means you probably didn’t need a link from those sites either.

See if you can remove the links as removing the link is my first priority and incase it is not possible try disavowing them.

Hope this helps!

[wordsyouwant]

Thanks guys! I think I'll approach it with the DMCA side first. I was reading the disavow tool should be a last ditch effort. This is a portfolio that I really don't want any traffic to and it is essentially content scraping for all intensive purposes, they are just putting the PDFs in a viewer rather than posting the actual content to the pages. I also suspect it's some sort of network of sites because they've all popped up recently and they're all using the same documents. There's literally no need to drive traffic to this part of my site, it's a portfolio for clients only.