Finally the Truth about Disavowing

The Most Needed Article Ever about Disavow Myths
In CognitiveSEO's blog, Lyndon Antcliff wrote a much needed article about disavow myths. Eight experts weigh in to "bust" the most common myths about disavowing. The experts include notables Mark Porter from Screaming Frog, Their powerful agreement makes it difficult for anyone to entertain the myths any longer. Here's the article.

Successful Disavows
At Ducktoes, we've often successfully used the disavow tool for client sites that have Penguin or manual penalties, including hacked sites. It usually works well, unless the site has other issues or too few good natural links. Disavowing often leads to recovery. And now that Penguin updates are part of the core, recovery times can be much quicker.

However, at seminars, in podcasts, or blog posts, most of what I read and hear about disavowing just doesn't jive with my experience. This makes me wonder: is it just coincidence that I do a disavowal for a site and the site recovers? Why does it work without link removal and commenting when it's not supposed to? So this post was refreshing. Yes! I said, when I read it.

The "Disavowing Just Doesn't Work" Myth
On the web and in person, I've also come across other colleagues and marketing people who entertain a strong belief that disavowing just doesn't work. I've shown them the sites I've rescued, but they've remained skeptical. Now I have something else to show them: a link to this article.

The "You have to Remove First" Myth
Another myth the article dispels is that you have to do manual link removal first.  This is such a relief to see in print. At workshops, conferences, or in SEO podcasts or blog posts, many, many experts say that both removal of unnatural links and commenting within the disavow file are necessary.

Typically, these seminar speakers say you must write three emails asking for removal of each link. Only then can you add the link to your disavowal file. After which, you need to write a comment in the file, following a hashtag, mentioning the three attempts at removal.

Omg, Are They Serious?
Often there can be thousands upon thousands of unnatural links linking to a site and attempting to remove them by contacting the thousands upon thousands of site owners is tantamount to temporary insanity (or causes it.) You just can't spend the time required.
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What's unfortunate, is that by following this advice, some poor SEO consultant (or more probaby his assistant), or many of them, will waste countless hours of their their own time and their clients' money trying to remove the links and then commenting within the disavowal file.

Early on, I discovered that comments and most removals weren't necessary. My discovery was based on my own experience and private case studies on client sites. It was reinforced by Marie Haynes's blog (one of the experts in this post). She's been telling us this for years. Thank you, Marie! She is the penalty removal expert of experts. Here's an article she wrote for her own blog.

Removal Can Help Occasionally
Don't get me wrong. Removal can help if it the webmaster is easy to contact and cooperative, and doesn't charge a fee for removal. Ironically, those are the very sites where the link's removal may not be necessary. You might even be able to change the anchor text. If the webmaster is a reasonable and conscientious person, she probably has a reasonable enough site. You might be able to leave your link and be okay. But in 90 to 95% of the cases, you can neither find nor contact the webmaster. Especially the really spammy sites you desperately need to remove. And you should never pay for removal of a link.

Some Reasons Link Removal Doesn't Work:

• There is no contact information on the site. 
• There is contact information, a contact form. But it is broken.
• You look up the who is information of the contact. Yet the information is either inaccurate or unavailable. 
• Unavailable meaning that the owner of the site has purchased privacy for their who is data and you can't access it.
• Inaccurate meaning that the contacts in the who is information are not contacts any longer or never were.
• Someone has copied text from your site and inserted it on their own and hasn't bothered to remove a navigational or other link, linking back to your site. In this case, you can let Google know about a copyright infringement.
• A fee is required to remove a link. (Don't pay.)
• The link is from a PBN (private blog network) where there is no contact information.
• The link is from a neglected or abandoned site. A spammy blogspot or Typepad blog with no contact information is a good examples of this.

Emailing into the Void
Even when you can find a contact to email, usually it's like emailing into the void. No one answers.

No Human Ever Reads the Comments
And according to Google's John Mueller on Twitter, no human ever reads all those comments you've laboriously written and inserted into your disavow file. It is "read" by a machine. No one is persuaded by all your hard but fruitless efforts to remove the bad links, because no one reads it. If no one reads it, then why are you writing it?  Sometimes I use comments as notes to myself, but I know no one else is ever going to read them.

So why are they Spreading Bad Advice?
So I've often wondered why SEO seminar experts entertain and spread the advice.

 Actually I have a pretty good guess. It's because in Google's Search Console Help there is an example of how to use the tool which include commenting and attempts at removal. This is the example:

No wonder people believe you need to remove and comment. Google seems to imply it. This is misleading.

Maybe for good reason. It just seems too easy on blatant spammers to be able disavow everything and not a pay a price. They spam and then get off scot-free without a real change of heart. And I sympathize. Spammers should pay a price, especially if they get out of penalty jail just to go on to spam again. I'd love to see them have to manually remove each link by writing thousands of emails. However, sometimes the real victims are not the spammers but the site owners. They never agreed to the spamming in the first place. Their only crime was being too complacent and allowing themselves to get sucked in by a black hat SEO company or unsavoury SEO consultant.

Unhacking Sites
The disavow tool is also essential to cleaning up hacked sites.  Hacked sites often have thousands of incoming links from other hacked sites with anchor texts for Viagra or payday loans among other dubious terms. Cleaning them up can be onerous. I've done it and have the disavow elbow to prove it. The chore is easier, however, if you disavow hundreds of domains instead of thousands of backlinks.

Another Myth not Mentioned
Another myth not mentioned in the article is that if the disavowed links still appear in the list of incoming sites in Google Search Console, it means the disavow didn't work. This is untrue because the links will usually still be there, but they've been zapped of their negative link juice. They now have the link juice typical of a "nofollow" link. I was reminded of this myth in the comments section in a remark by Sha Menz.