Questions about Bad Backlinks and Disavow Tool
- SEO |
I'm a beginner at SEO, and I have a few questions about a situation my website is going thru. I don't expect anyone to know all the answers, but any insight from experienced internet marketers would be greatly appreciated.
My website has been running for about 6 years and is profitable. However sales have slower than they used to be, since the last 10 months or so. I don't know the reason why or if it has anything to do with SEO. Either way, I have started paying more attention to SEO so I can make my business stronger.
I have taken a look at my backlink profile from Google Webmaster Tools. I have backlinks from 262 domains. Out of that, 128 backlinks are obvious spam sites. They have extremely low quality garbage content which is generated by a bot, most of the writing doesn't even make sense. These links have nothing to do with me. I did not create these links, and neither did I hire anybody to do so. I think they are all coming from the same source because the content is very similar and all websites are using the same wordpress theme.
I want to get rid of them. But because 50% of my backlinks are from these spam links, disavowing them would mean losing half of my backlinks. I'm afraid this may negatively affect my SEO. Should I just keep these bad backlinks and just work on building good backlinks, or should I remove them?
Here are a couple examples of the domains that the links are coming from:
http://safemaleenhancement.com/
http://instantmaleenhancement.com/
http://malesizeenhancement.com/
http://penishealthy.news/
Does Google definitely know that this is spam and penalizing my website for it? Or is it possible that Google is accidentally considering it a good backlink and removing it will hurt my rankings? Please note that I haven't received any warning from Google or manual web spam actions.
The reason I am asking so many questions is because I have read many articles like this: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven't actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you're essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it's not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
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