Which Backlinks to Disavow?

[sanar]

I am a site owner just getting to learn more about managing things myself after outsourcing SEO to a firm a year back (they stopped all activities about 8 months back).

The question I have is about disavowing the low quality links. After collecting all the data from many sites on the basis of this helpful posting - (http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal), I am now left with around 2,800 back-links. I discovered most of the bad ones using ahrefs and majestic (and Google webmaster did not show many of the bad links). In fact, in the very first place, I realized that there was a spam  problem when I saw the anchor cloud on ahrefs which showed many unrelated anchors for my site.

I have three questions:

**First, **Many URL's are actually from websites which have nothing to do with my line of business and I can sure spot them. What I get confused with is this - I can not say that these sites are downright spam. Some of them look to be good sites for example - a coffee machine vendor (with full business details and a fairly decent looking business), a Nike sports shoes mart etc. But they have nothing to do with my business.

So my first question is - What is spam really? Would a back link from a high ranking website in the travel industry be considered spam from the point of view of someone who runs a website for medical equipment, specially if the back-link is from an unrelated anchor text like - "3 nights travel package" (which has nothing to do with medical business). I think I should disavow all the low quality back links with an erroneous anchor but Id like some views on this.

Second, I see that in the disavow file, one could either upload a whole domain or a specific URL (could somebody please confirm this). I have some sites which have 8-12 (more in some cases) back links to my site. In most cases these sites are either really bad quality or have nothing to do with my business. I am tempted to disavow the entire domain for such sites instead of going by the URL's. Any views?

Third, this is what I'd really like some help with. In case I delete the very pages (on my site) to which these back links point, should I still disavow the pointing domain?

Finally: I have not created most of these backlinks. In fact, over the last 2-3 months we have started creating links from good sites in my industry. Most of the anchor cloud is good for me on ahrefs but there are these bad ones to which my question relates. I have not got any manual penalty from Google, though my traffic I think took a hit in the first week of October 2013.

[Felip3]

Did you see any lost in traffic in your site lately? You should be very careful removing link many of those links might be actually helping your ranks. If you don't have any penalty or traffic decrease I think is better use of your time to keep building good links.

[sanar]

Most helpful David. Thanks for that.

I had the similar views. Really reassuring to get this from you. I'll take the liberty of asking another one which has bothered me recently - I have my site "www.abc.com". I also have a blog "www.bolg.abc.com" Do you think the bad links of the main site could in any way have a negative impact on the blog?

Also - Any experience on how long does google take to factor in the disavow?

Thanks again

Rajat

[Kingof5]

I'm gonna answer these in the most simple way possible, others can elaborate:

1. If the unrelated site actually featured you for something - ex. you sponsored a program for this travel company, they mention it on their site and link back to you - then that's fine. If it's totally random and not related, it's not fine. If links to you have anchor text that's not related to your site, that's spam.

2. Almost always disavow at the domain level. Exceptions would be if someone set up a spammy blogspot.com or tumblr.com page - those are big, authoritative domains and you don't want to block them completely. In that case I'd go with the URL level instead of domain level.

3. I'd still disavow the links, even if you delete the pages they point to. It's better to cover all bases in a situation like this.