To Disavow, or not?

[tcolling]

Hi - I'm working on a site that has somewhere between 1200 and 1500 backlinks.  Somewhere around 800 or 1000 of the links have one of four or five exact keyword phrases that this company paid a former seo to create links for.

They ranked well for those phrases until last fall and then almost overnight they fell completely out of the first 50 SERP results.   They did NOT receive a manual penalty.  This leads me to two questions:

1.  This sounds like they were hit by Penguin, rather than Panda.  Do I have that right?

2.  Is there any value in disavowing the 800 or so spammy links?  Is there any danger in doing so?

Thanks!

[CHarkins]

Based on what you are describing they may have tripped an algorithmic penalty based on anchor text density.

Since the site has not (yet) received an unnatural links warning, you don't have to start removing those links - but I'd recommend you have a plan just in case.

Rather than disavowing these links, have you thought about these tactics:

1. Contacting the sites to get the anchor text changed.

2. Coming up with a new content campaign to generate more (and more diverse) links to reduce the anchor text density and add more quality links to the site

[tcolling]

Thank you for taking time to respond to my question, Craig.  I appreciate your help.

Re: "Contacting the sites to get the anchor text changed": that's not going to work in this case.  They're just spammy link webs / farms and they don't respond to such requests.

We are indeed publishing new content and working to get some new links via that approach.

Thanks!

[CHarkins]

In that case have the contact and disavow plan on tap and ready to execute if needed.

Google doesn't want you to just disavow links that they think are bad; they want you to go through the process of attempting to get them removed. Even if you know there is a 0% chance, you'll have to do it and document your process.

There are a couple of good YouMoz posts detailing this.