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new to Stack Exchange so forgive me if im in the wrong place. Heres the scenario...

We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics.

They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly.

The situation we are now in is this:

We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence.

I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page.

Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites.

Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation?

Any advice is much appreciated,

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as Google stated, the disavow tool is merely an indicator and Google may (or may not) use your submitted information. Disavowed or not, you could always re-disavow again. But come again ... why is your internal page "offending"? If the information is good, why shouldn't it rank higher than a generic homepage? – DKOATED Mar 15 at 11:13
Because the site is a large national site with almost 3mill pages, its already suffered a hosting issue where another domain was pointing to the root folder causing duplicate content. A disavow request was sent for this after recieving a warning, and we are currently resolving via the hosting company. However, disavow requests are handled manually and im concerned that this situation screams obvious spam links, which could cause the site to be penalised further down the line. – Silkstream Mar 15 at 11:17
to be honest, you need to talk to a SEO about that which can look at the issue holistically. don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but your "duplicate content" through multiple domains issue was handled wrong. very wrong... on the other hand, if incoming links are "screaming" spam links, Google does a pretty good job in filtering out those links ... – DKOATED Mar 15 at 11:21
Yeah we figured that was handled wrong by the companies previous seo company, hence we are in contact with the hosting company. I only managed to discover the details of the disavow request they submitted by downloading a copy through webmaster tools yesterday. – Silkstream Mar 15 at 11:26
So your opinion would be not to worry about the links as they have received no negative impact as yet? – Silkstream Mar 15 at 11:27
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1 Answer

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To answer your question at hand. At the moment, you have only two possible solutions to remove "bad incoming links".

  1. Approach the Link-Setter and ask for removal (tedious work, may not work all the time).
  2. Use the Google disavow tool.

You can disavow as much as you want, just make sure you disavow the "right" pages. Google looks at the disavowed pages holistically and may or may not count these as nofollows for your serp-positioning calculation.

In my experience, the usage of the disavow tool is in 99 out of 100 cases unneeded, since Google themselves do a pretty good job of identifying spam links and removing these from their serp-calculation. It's the one case, where a black hat seo company (or someone else doing you bad) did a VERY GOOD job of building a bad backlinking profile to your site.

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