Google's John Mueller had a lot to say this morning, he said basically, you should only disavow links when they are really problematic. If they are not relevant anymore, that is not a reason to disavow those links.
John was presented with the question at 8:20 mark into the Google Hangout on Google+. The question was:
Our eCommerce site used to sells lots of products. Now we only concentrate on a few. So our SEO agency disavowed all links which are now not related to us. Is that correct or can I put them back as our traffic/rankings decreased? How long before it recovers?
John said no, add those links back. He said:
So in general, if you are just doing site maintenance, changing things on your web site, that wouldn’t be a case where you’d need to disavow your backlinks.Disavowing backlinks is really mostly for the case where there are really problematic links pointing to your page and you want to say I want nothing to do with that. In a case like this, where these links might be completely normal links to your web site, they are just for older products or things you no longer provide, then that is something you don’t really disavow them for. Because this is something, that as a company, you kind of build up value over time, years… And it is normal that companies change their focus from time to time or shift their focus slightly. So that is not really the type of situation where you want to disavow there.
So I might go through those files and…really disavow the links that are really problematic and maybe remove the ones that are kind of normal, normal links to your web site for other products.
So don't disavow links that you earned and are real.
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Forum discussion at Google+.
