Whether to disavow fettish sites

[BobGW]

Hello,

In one niche, all competitors have fettish backlinks. Some of these sites have related products on them, some are just information, but some border on porn sites.

I'm wondering which if not all of these I should disavow. There's quite a few.

We're doing a non-manual penguin recovery based on link building like paid links, unnatural anchor text and doorway sites.

Thanks.

[MattAntonino]

If it's related to your industry and most of your competitor sites have the same type of links, that may be what Google expects to see. I think site speed & backlinks are two places where every niche is unique to itself.

In a site speed example, I've seen photography keywords where every page 1 result the site takes over 8 seconds to load. Now, in an informational, mostly-text niche like say "george bush biography" that would be really, really bad. I think Google would expect to see sites in that niche load very fast. But photographers all have these full screen images, large portfolios, they're showing off the work, etc. I think the algo rightly realizes that if MOST sites that return a keyword are slower than average, site speed probably counts for a bit less overall as the distinctions are smaller.

Same with backlinks - if your competitors all have these borderline links and they have authority, and you remove yours, I would fully expect your site to drop rather than rise in the rankings. Disavow is good for removing authority but doesn't often give you a positive bonus. It just keeps you from negative problems. To beat a competitor you don't need to avoid the negative. You need to add positive. I would focus on that side of the equation to see the best results.