Should I disavow links from Dead Domains?

[dk5]

Have a new client who hired a fly-by-night backlinking company. They made 500 links from directories and 160 of these are on domains that have been deleted.

So should I inlcude the 160 dead links in my disavow?

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

The only reason I would suggest disavowing is when the links are coming from spammy domains. So, if those dead domains were spammy - then sure. Otherwise it'll drop off on it's own without any harm.

Hope this helps.

[dk5]

Thanks Dmitri,

Quick follow up it was 40% of the domains backlinks that appeared on these now dead domains. And all the domains were deleted in the last 60 days so Google saw a huge number of our backlinks disappear overnight. We also dropped over that period and think this might be a contributor.

So I guess that's the second side of it - if we disavow Google will no longer consider the 40% of links from dead domains. Will disavowing boost in this case?

[DmitriiK]

Well, here is a thing about disavowing - it takes quite a bit of time for google to recrawl everything and apply for rankings. The sudden change in gain and drop off was what hurt you guys. I really doubt disavow would help. You can do it - no difference to you, just time spent

[MarieHaynes]

I'd still disavow these because you never know when those dead domains may come back online again. There is no disadvantage to disavowing spammy directories that no longer exist other than the time it takes to do so.

With that said, however, it's not likely to make a significant difference to your rankings whether you leave these or disavow them.  In the past, these spammy domains had the possibility of causing your site to be suppressed by the Penguin algorithm. But when Google released Penguin 4.0 in September of 2016, Penguin no longer demotes. It simply stops counting any link metrics from spammy links.

So why disavow? There are a few reasons:

• If you ever get a manual review of the website by the webspam team and you haven't disavowed you're at risk for getting an unnatural links penalty. You do NOT want that.

-There are other algorithms outside of Penguin that look at links. We don't know much about them, but best to be safe rather than sorry.

-Even though Google says they are simply not counting spammy links, I wouldn't want to trust their word completely and simply ignore spammy links.