Do I need to actively disavow links to my site?

[Don34]

I check the "Links to my site" section in Google WMT on a regular basis. In the past couple of months I've been seeing more and more weird links, from pretty spammy domains and even a few from weird Iranian domains.

It's Needless to say but I have never bought a link or been involved in any link schemes or the like. Like probably everyone in the Internet, I'm in a competitive vertical, and my competitors probably aren't so scrupulous.

The question is, do I actively need to disavow suspicious links? Should I contact the domains and ask to remove them? I have usually just ignored these links, and not wasted time in doing anything with them (since weird automated links are always around) but the proliferation in the last couple months has started to worry me.

[RafalJ]

Yes you do. If there are spammy links built to your site, you are likely to get a Penguin penalty at some point and that is a pain to recover from, so you want to be pro-active and minimise the risk of it happening by disavowing these links and also by removing them altogether if possible.

This is a video where Matt Cutts answers your question - http://youtu.be/eFJZXpnsRsc

[donford]

HI Don,

This is a regular concern I have seen here on Moz. Really we want to understand the purpose of Disavow, which is to remove penalties that were brought on by Link Spamming that many companies did to boost their rankings. Sometimes their selves, sometimes by hiring bad SEO companies. Either way the idea is a last resort for those who had fallen in a pit.

Early on people worried that Google's algorithm change could in fact bring a new type of SEO (Negative SEO) that is where a company is paid to use the same old spam tactics but instead of targeting the hiring company they target their competitors in hopes to inflict a penalty on them. Google was well aware of this possibility and tried their best to prevent that from happening. You should see Matt Cutts video about this topic on youtube here.

There are some crappy sites out there that regularly create links to good sites for whatever reason. This is actually normal, and should not be much of a concern unless it becomes apparent that you are being targeted by a Negative SEO campaign. If so, then yes use the disavow tool. If you already have a very strong back link profile the impact of a few random bad links should have no impact.

I hope this helps,

Don

[Don34]

It seems to me that it won't be really clear if I am the target of a Negative SEO campaign, and I remember the Matt Cutts video- He basically says not to worry about negative SEO, and to use Disavow only if you get a manual action penalty.

This is why I generally ignored these links, and I believe that my link profile is pretty solid. However as you can see in the answers to this question, its still a contended issue.

[donford]

Yes I agree that it is a contended issue. I would think most industries this would be of little concern but as Matt points out in his video there are some industries that maybe more prone to this.

As you may know getting random links from sub-par sites is fairly common. I would of course be pro-active about checking my backlinks but not start worrying until I saw a large spike. If you do see this, you will likely have time to get your disavow done before anything happens.

[PhilNottingham]

In short - It's probably worth proactively disavowing those links since it's a quick and easy task, but the possibility of them actually causing you any harm is ultimately very small.

I wouldn't worry about asking the webmasters to remove the links unless you're under manual penality, as this won't be a particularly good use of time.