Too many links pointing to our privacy policy page: Hurting our ranking efforts of main pages?

[vtmoz]

Hi community,

As per the "Links" report from GSC, there are  millions of pages pointing to our privacy policy page. We can expect high number of links to this page being  ours an open source product. But these links are overtaking the count of links pointing to our homepage which are very artificial from few  spammy or low quality sites. "Privacy policy" anchor text is also been the top anchor text.

Our homepage ranking dropped and I suspect this is the culprit. Google might be considering this is the important page being linked on top with anchor text. Shall I Disavow these sites and will this makes Google stop counting  links, and the anchor text coming from these sites as well?

Suggestions please.

Thanks

[effectdigital]

I'd at least give it a try and see what happens, if it turns out that your hypothesis is wrong you can always un-disavow the links. When you upload a txt file to the disavow tool, it counts that as your total disavow efforts (so if you just upload a txt file containing these links you have spotted, you may lose previous disavow work). Be sure to download your existing disavow file so you can add to it, instead of just uploading the links you have found

A side-effect of this though, is that later you could upload your disavow again excluding those links and un-disavow them. Before you do anything, you'd want to evaluate the technical features of those links. If they are all no-followed, they won't count towards Google's rankings anyway, so no action would be required (on your part)

Usually speaking, I would suggest making your homepage more link-worthy so that it gains more backlinks over time. Since this case is so extreme, you might actually want to consider disavow (or getting those links no-followed). Followed site-wide links can negatively affect rankings, under certain circumstances