To disavow or Not to disavow is the question?

[UnderMe]

OK,

I have done some analysis of my site and it seems quite clear that I have been hit by Penguin and this is largely down to my link building strategy.

My question now is;

1. Do I try to undo the damage by disavowing toxic links I have identified, or

2. Do I just accept what is and ensure that from here on in I follow natural backlink acquisition?

Thanks

[Robert_G]

You should contact the webmasters of those websites where you have spammy links and ask them to remove them.

If that fails, you can create a list of domains and use the disavowl tool.

This is how Google recommends us to do it.

[benners]

Hi

I'm in a similar position to you and have been trying to get my site back since about Sept 2012. Over the last 4 weeks, I've been through the process of requesting link removal of low quality links using the RemoveEm.com tool. I now have a report detailing sites I've contacted, how many times and whether the link has been removed. My site has lost rankings rather than being completely dropped from the SERPs so I may need to use the disavow tool rather than just do a re-index.

So my answer would be,

1. Try removing poor quality links yourself first and perhaps use a tool to help do this www.removeem.com. Then use the disavow tool
2. A natural policy going forward has not helped my site.
See http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-anyway-to-recover-my-site-s-rankings

[UnderMe]

Thanks C Benbow.

Whilst you say that the natural policy of using removeem.com has not worked in your case, did you find the removeem tool useful for identifying toxic links in the first place?

If so I might use the tool to identify the toxic links rather than sifting through site explorer results and then go straight to disavow process with the links removeem highlights.

Thanks

[benners]

I don't know if removing bad links will work for me or not as I've only just completed the process. I now plan on using the disavow tool to remove the links I didn't get removed by my own efforts.

The removeem.com tool did help me identify potentially harmful links. It's a tedious task so using a tool like Removeem over Site Explorer and manual removal requests was the way I chose to go.