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After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation.

We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone.  No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google.   But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all.

A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users.

We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google.  We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers.  I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles.   People can comment there as well if they like.

Are there any potential downsides to doing this?  My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings.

Thank you.

My understanding is that this information is wrong.  If you are dealing with an obviously spammy website that has no value or real content, you are supposed to disavow the root domain.  As per Matt Cutts:  https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-machete-16844.html

One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That's one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.

Obviously you don't want to disavow an entire domain if the domain itself is a legit website.  That is just basic common sense.  But a universal rule that you "must point to the exact link" is factually false.  Just like a rule that you "must disavow the root domain" would be factually false.  You look at each link and make a decision how to proceed.

So my question was about root domain disavows.  I gave some examples above.

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1)  I've been told that other sites linking to my site with keyword-rich text are bad.

2)  But Google Console / Analytics shows that we rank extremely high for random, pointless phrases loosely tied to the topic of our site.  Like "dht blocker".  (its a hair loss site)

3)  This week I began analyzing our backlinks.  Guess what I found?  Literally hundreds of bot-created spammy trackback and pingback text links around the phrase "dht blocker"

It seems to me that keyword rich anchor text on external sites is NOT a bad thing.  In fact its an outstanding way to rank better for your desired keywords.  Obviously the "bad" is the spam element.  Probably the high quantity.  On unrelated websites.  But guess what?  It worked.  _We are ranking extremely well for these pointless phrases, thanks to these spam bots.  _

Obviously we will be disavowing all these sites.  But I want to start building quality links via legitimate, honest means.

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So here is my question:

If I begin a legitimate honest link building campaign with other websites, and request that they put the HREF around our most coveted keyword phrase - is this inherently BAD?  Or is it actually possibly GOOD? -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts?

So there's no way I could type out my thoughts / questions.   If you're bored, have a cup of coffee and some oreos, and are interested in a strange situation that I can't figure out the solution to, I'd appreciate your input:

https://youtu.be/GomGOAdNens

I should note ahead of time:  It really is important to me to do things "by the book" and "to the letter" with SEO.   So while there may be some gray areas, I would like to really do the one thing that is BEST in this situation.  Thanks for any input.