Disavow links of my own in niche forums that i post to regularly?

[Shawn124]

Hi Yall,

I'm disavowing a new set of links and have come across a wall:

Let's say your niche is in web hosting and you post to forums such as a webhostingtalk.com (a forum very popular in the hosting business).  If your sole purpose is mostly selling your business and you have links (not anchor text keywords) that you direct users to for specific products and such...do you do a disavow those links?

I'm not leaving links like: Web hosting, or, Free Hosting...

I'm posting deals and answering some questions on other posts that direct to my site with traditional links.

Thank you

[MattAntonino]

To be honest, I don't know. I don't think anyone "knows" the answer to this.

You should be 'allowed' to post your link on a forum that allows you to post your link. Google does try to make pretty much all links irrelevant but in our experience, they aren't yet. Links still matter (a lot.)  I think niche links in your own industry on relevant forums where you're active?  Those are at least in the top 50% of all links you could possibly see online. If they're no good, what is?

(Yes, Google wants "links you don't control." I get that and it makes sense. But they're built so infrequently that it's very difficult to judge billions of sites based on a few uncontrolled links from a few major brands. (We had a client get a sitewide link from ebay.com.au against our advice. It penalised the client's site ... so even a link from Ebay itself can hurt you if it's the wrong link.)

I would leave these links. You can always disavow later but it's harder to get them back if you disavow now.

[ofw12387]

I would not disavow, it sounds that you links are totally ok, but if you are not sure, try to use "nofollow" and you should be ok

Br

[MarieHaynes]

When I make decisions on links like this I base my decisions on overall intent and scale.  If you've got a small handful of links like these and they're not keyword anchored then I'd leave them.  But, if this is your main way of getting links then I'd be more concerned.

From my experience in dealing with manual penalties, the majority of the time when Google gives us an example from a forum, it's really obvious that it's an unnatural link.  It'll usually have a keyword anchor or really not make sense to be there other than for the SEO value.  I would think that the same logic goes in to Penguin decisions.

The other factor that may weigh in to my decision making is what other types of links come from those forum posts.  If there were links to casino and porn, etc then I'd be worried Google would not like the quality of links in those forums.  That doesn't sound like it applies to you.

No one knows for sure, when it comes to Penguin, but that's what I'd do.