Disavowing in 2019 and Beyond - Should you be auditing your links? - 1 views
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We decided at MHC to stop offering link audits as we did not feel that it was right to offer a service that could be completely unnecessary. However, we found that a few clients were quite insistent and wanted to give disavowing a try. We filed a few disavows and were incredibly pleased to see that some of these sites saw nice gains a few weeks to months later.
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We’ll hopefully soon be putting out a thorough guide to disavowing. For now though, we would recommend that you only file a disavow if you are confident in understanding what Google considers a natural link to be. Also, if you are having an SEO company audit your links, we would recommend that you only use companies that manually review your links and have good knowledge of Google’s guidelines on linking. If your SEO company is filing disavows based mostly on recommendations from tools, we feel that this work is unlikely to result in improvements in ranking.
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Where we really would be worried is if a competitor took the time to get articles published on authoritative sites by paying for links from journalists, exchanging links with prominent bloggers, or doing other things that go against Google’s guidelines. The problem though, is that initially, this type of link has the potential to actually INCREASE your rankings if not detected as unnatural by Google. Also, this type of link is hard to get! A negative SEO campaign of this nature would take an incredible amount of effort.
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We also have a theory that would negate a lot of negative SEO attempts. (So sorry for the bad pun.). We think that it is possible that Google is only passing PageRank through sites with good E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust). If this is true, then most links on the web, including the vast majority of negative SEO links are simply being ignored. Also, the only links that a competitor could place that would cause Google to distrust the site, would be ones that conversely could end up being fantastic links that have the potential to improve your rankings.We still think that this type of sneakiness is possible in some highly competitive, big money verticals. If you are noticing a large influx of links like this that really do look like sophisticated attempts to manipulate Google rankings, then, in some cases it may be a good idea to pre-emptively disavow those links. But be careful. You could do more harm than good!