Hi Our organic referrers are steadily declining, and I need to arrest the slide. My site got hit by Penguin on May 21. As a result, I am about to disavow the majority of the backlinks - about 90% or 3000. I've gone through them , and found the ones that google will see as únnatural' Do you think it would be unwise to disavow so many links? At the same time, my options to mitigate another big drop is to do the following: increase SEM re start the company blog seek out some quality links what do you think?
I think you're definitely on the right track for what you're going to do in the future. By increasing your positive SEM and by starting your company blog, and even trying to get some quality links, you're going to be moving in the right direction. Certainly what you need to be focusing on right now is creating quality content that's going to build natural links, and that's actually going to solve a lot of your problem because it sounds like you haven't been penalized, but that may be Google's algorithm has found that you have a questionable link profile. You may also want to deal with some of the spammy links, but of course, Google doesn't actually want you to just use the disavowal tool. What they would prefer is for you to actually have those spammy links removed. So, the first step that you should do is to try to have those removed by either logging in to the website and deleting them if you have that kind of control, or by contacting the webmaster for the site and asking them to delete the links. Then you want to do that a few times just to give a few efforts to do it and then you can start using the disavow links tool for any links that you have not been able to have removed. By doing both, removing spammy links and creating natural links at the same time, you actually should be able to correct your problem pretty quickly. Maybe in just a few months you might go to see some pretty good turnaround. So, keep on the track that you're going and start creating great quality content, distribute it well and get those natural links.
I agree with OP. If you start your work from now, creating content and building natural links then this effort would normalize your unnatural stuffs.
I just manually removed about 2,000 (probably worthless bookmarked) links. Then I disavowed about another thousand (mostly directories). In total, that's maybe half the links to my website. I'll watch it for a few months and hopefully it will bring some recovery. Meanwhile, back to work on content!
I think that's a wee bit too much and really, even Google recommends using the disavow tool sparingly. I suggest you go over your backlinks and get rid only of the negative or spammy ones. You might also want to double your efforts building quality links to your site instead of disavowing 90% of your backlinks. Hope that helps. Have a good day!
Disavowing 90% of a website's links is a pretty draconian step to take, that's for sure — unless 90% of his website's links were spammy. In that case, he should indeed get rid of them.