Should My website needs to be disavowed or not?

[AKClinics]

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[BruceA]

Try to contact the spammy link sites to get them removed.

But always if in doubt about any link, do your homework and check it out, if still in doubt,disavow.

Bruce

[MarieHaynes]

Here are my thoughts:

1. If you see a spammy site but you can't find your link anymore I'd still disavow.  There's no harm in doing so.  The link may have moved to another page or may pop up again.

2. If a site no longer resolves but you know that the originating link on that site was unnatural, then yes, disavow.

3. No, you don't need to include nofollowed links.  What disavowing does is ask Google not to count that link any more.  Nofollowed links already don't count.

Bonus tip: Make sure you disavow at the domain level.

[Chris661]

Marie is expert in this area and gives great advice here. She has helped many of us in this predicament.

I just wanted to follow up on her tip to disavow at the domain level. This is very important if the link location changes now or in the future. Note format for your GWT disavow file:

domain:spamsite.com

[ShaMenz]

Hi AKClinics,

The answers above are all great,  but given that this thread is likely to be read by others who may be dealing with a manual action instead of a Penguin issue, there is something else I think needs to be mentioned.

In general, since nofollowed links are not passing PageRank, but as Marie explained above are passing a suggestion to Google that they should not be counted, there is no need to include them in a cleanup effort or disavow them.

However, I have seen many instances of nofollowed links built by SEO agencies that are part of a wide scale effort to manipulate the algorithm. In one memorable case a link builder truly excelled sarcasm by creating comments with multiple links on every single page of a site with thousands of pages. Every one of those links was nofollowed, but the fact that the link builder didn't know the links were of no value does not alter the fact that it was clearly a manipulative effort.

So, where such instances appear when conducting analysis for a site with a manual action my preference is always to try to remove those links and to disavow them. There are two reasons I take this approach:

1. Make it clear to the Webspam team at reconsideration that the site owner is genuinely committed to cleaning up the fruits of all overtly manipulative linking efforts regardless of whether required by them or not. This helps to reinforce commitment to a change of mindset for the future.
2. Leaving those links out there is not a good look for the Brand. People who happen to see those comments or dig into the backlink profile in the future will form an opinion of the Brand based on what they see. Leaving masses of obviously undesirable links in play is leaving the Brand open to a negative interpretation. If I can possibly get them removed then I will.

Since you are not dealing with a manual action, you don't necessarily need to worry about this, but for those who are, I would be wary of just disregarding all nofollowed links without checking to see if they are part of a wider scale manipulative effort.

Sha

[AKClinics]

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