Advice - Remova/ Disavowl of Inbound Spam Links

[JH_OffLimits]

We have a fair few of inbound spam links in the 1000s with a spam score going all the way up to 90.

What would be the best thing to deal with this, i'm thinking to disavow anything about 40. But we are fearful of any issues which could come of this.

Any advice would be really helpful.

[MartyPeeps]

Yes, it will be a bit of a pain but you need to take the time to disavow them all. I had a similar problem with one of my websites last year and it took me a good few hours to deal with successfully.

I created a handy disavow file generator over at Lead Peep if that's any help to you. Just paste all of your links into the text field and it'll give you a file to download ready to upload straight to Google. You can find it here.

Good luck - let me know if you need any help!

[JH_OffLimits]

Thanks for the response and really insightful, but at what degree do we consider links to be spam worthy? Is there a recommended thresh hold to remove? Say 5 spam score and above or what?

[MartyPeeps]

It's hard to say from a SPAM score perspective, the best thing to do is base it on your thoughts as and when you see them, but certainly the low quality ones will more than likely want to be disavowed. Look at anchors, if they're generic or brand then I wouldn't worry about them, but any SPAMMY ones using money terms I'd disavow immediately.

I hope that makes sense. If you let me know your URL I wouldn't mind taking a look for you.

[JH_OffLimits]

Okay makes sense, but what about inbound links that have an attribute of nofollow, do these also pose a threat / issue.

[MartyPeeps]

Only Google really knows the answer to that question.

Some people will say yes, and some will say no, but for me personally I'd go ahead and disavow them as I think nofollow links help at least to some extent and in some capacity.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

It's not the nicest task in the world, but unfortunately, it's best to manually review websites before you add them to a disavow file. You can use metrics such as Moz spam score to filter them and start with the worst score which may speed up the process a bit. You could also try and prioritise multiple URLs that are from the same domain. For example, if you have 50 URLs linking to you from one domain which looks suspect, you probably only need to review a few of those URLs in order to understand the quality/type of link they are and take action.

I'd avoid putting a hard rule in place such as disavowing anything below a certain metric score. You may accidentally disavow links which are perfectly fine.

There is also some debate as to the impact that the disavow tool has unless you have a manual or algorithmic penalty in place. If you don't see any evidence of a penalty, my advice would be to only disavow links which are clearly low quality/spammy.

Hope that helps!

Paddy