The other day I reported that Google said in most cases it is perfectly safe to ignore, not act, on bad links pointing to your site. That caused a bit of a ripple through the link building, well, the nofollow, SEO industry. John Mueller from Google has since added more details on what he meant.
John Mueller added a few more comments on Twitter. Including:
(1) The most toxic links are almost always links that SEOs place themselves and are very easy to find:
In my experience, the links that are the most "toxic" are the ones that SEOs place themselves, so you don't really need to dig for those. /shrug
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 13, 2018
(2) The disavow file is still useful for fixing manual actions, & peace of mind for negative-SEO / old weirdness in links:
I see it for pre-emptive (played links, oops, save the manual action hassle), fixing manual actions, & peace of mind for negative-SEO / old weirdness in links (if you're worried, just disavow and move on with life).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 13, 2018
(3) Maintaining your disavow file is probably all not that of a great use of your time:
I'd keep the old disavow file. Removing unnecessary entries is fine, but it won't change things so I'd save the time for things that really matter.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 12, 2018
