Google's John Mueller said in a hangout last week that he would recommend that you not just disavow links that have already resulted in manual actions but you can also disavow links that you think would lead or result in a manual action. This is in addition to what John said about how it can help algorithmically with trust.
John was asked about this by Marie Haynes at the 14:03 mark into the video.
Question:
I have a question about the disavow tool. So we get people all the time who want us to do link audits and ever since Penguin 4.0, so September of 2016 where Gary has said and I think you said as well like Google's pretty good at ignoring unnatural links. So my thought at that time was well what we shouldn't have to use the disavow tool to ask Google to ignore links that they're already ignoring, unless you had a manual action for unnatural links. So we've been only recommending it for sites that have been actively you know building links, trying to manipulate on things, things that are unnatural links. But I think there's so much confusion amongst webmasters because I see people all the time you know charging tons of money to disavow links that are just I know they're being ignored. So I would love if we could have just a little bit more clarification, so maybe if I can give you an example like. If there was a business owner who a few years ago hired an SEO company and that SEO company did a bunch of guest posting just for links and you know so that was kind of medium quality, if you know what I mean. not ultra spammy. Can we be confident that Google's ignoring those links or should we be going in and disavowing.
Answer:
I think that's a good question. So from from my point of view what what I would look at there is the one hand definitely the cases where there is a manual action but also the cases where you as someone who's seen a lot of manual actions would say well if the webspam team looked at this now they would give you a manual action. Kind of the cases where you'd say well the manual action is it's more a matter of time and not kind of like it's based on something that was I don't know where it's clearly done a couple years ago, borderline also. That's the kind of stuff I'd say anyway but the kind of stuff where you look at it and say if if someone from the webspam team kind of got this as a tip they would take a manual action and that's definitely the kind of thing where I would clean that up so something a disavow.
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