HELP - Should I Disavow SEO, Site Analysis, and Website Worth Links?

[Humanovation]

I have a gadget site and have MANY links to my site from sites that offer web analysis or SEO tools.  For example, the site chkme.com has over 1,000 links to my home page.  I don't know who they are, why they are linking to my site, and their site is irrelevant to my industry.  Should I disavow links from sites like these?  My site seems to be linked to from a lot of "website worth" type sites as well.  I think I may have been hit with an unnatural site penalty but I do NO blackhat or any type of link building whatsoever.

Thanks in advance

[MoosaHemani]

If you think that your rankings and traffic goes down due to these links, I would highly advice you to outreach them manually first and try to remove the links (as many as possible) and then move towards disavowing a link!

[Gijsbert]

I would disavow them with 1000 of links from a domain you don't know

[KarlBantleman]

I've had to deal with a few clients that have been spammed by someone. In 3 out of 4 of these websites, it has had no effect on our rankings because we had a strong back link profile anyway. However, with the other, as it was a new website, these links ended up accounting for about 30% of the total links which ended up having an adverse effect on our rankings.

I'd disavow all the links and then try and get in touch with the webmasters of the website. I know you are meant to try and get them all taken down first but you should do both because it could take you months to get them taken down (if you can get a response at all). I take it you've not had a message in Webmaster Tools? If not then its an algorithm penalty rather than a manual penalty. I'd use as many tools as possible, Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc to get a comprehensive list of links to your website and then start disavowing them....just be 100000% sure they are bad links!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Patrick

It is a little tricky to say for sure without the context of the site. However, the one link you've cited, those are typically not an issue. I'm pretty confident Google sees that as a "junk" site, scraping links, repurposed content etc that's not "real".

I would worry about links that were done to clearly attempt to over-optimize - either through being paid, anchor text, sitewide links on low-ish quality sites, links within content that is not at all relevant.

Conversely, you can be proactive by trying to build links that look as natural as possible - domain/brand/propword anchor text.

In fact I think Cyrus' video pretty astutely describes what to look out for.

You really have to discern if links were done maliciously (if you did not build them) and those would be the ones to use disavow.

Hope that helps!

-Dan