Should you do a disavow even if you don't have a manual penalty?

[Gavo]

If you are working on a website which has a history spammy links, but no manual penalty by Google... is it still worthwhile to still go through the link removal and disavow process?

Thoughts appreciated.

[SamuelScott]

The short answer? Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says, "Yes!" Look at this article. Here's the main quote:

"If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks like there's some weird bot that's building up a bunch of links to your site and you have no idea where it came from, that's the perfect time to use disavow as well," Cutts said. "I wouldn't worry about going ahead and disavowing links even if you don't have a message in your webmaster console."

The long answer? In my opinion, I would agree. If you think that there's even a chance that you could be hit by a penalty now or in the future, then I would disavow. Obviously, you want to prevent this from occurring long before it would ever happen. And if you are questioning whether your links may cause your site to get hit, then you likely have a problem simply because you're asking yourself the question.

However, it always depends on the site itself. If you or a bad SEO have done things like bulk directory submissions with exact-match anchor text, then you surely want to disavow them as soon as possible. But if you only have a few questionable links, then it's less urgent. But I would disavow any and all of them and start focusing on earning links (rather than building them) through content and PR (as I wrote in this Moz post).

Good luck!

[MattAntonino]

I agree with Samuel's response.  Yes, you should disavow the bad links. Why wait to drop in rankings and see how long it takes to regain them?  Given the time available you should always be creating the best profile you can and now that Google has given us this tool, use it.

(Just a note - we've proactively disavowed over 1200 clients link profiles and have NOT seen a negative effect on them. We have seen some good results even for those who didn't "have a penalty.")

[Gavo]

Thanks Sam and Matt,

Great responses and I'll now get going on disavowing the project I'm working on.

Much appreciated.