I have never seen any situations in which the disavow tool has helped. Its a waste of time, best goal is to remove links from websites if you want to remove a penalty as mr. Cutts has said in all of his videos.
Google's Matt Cutts says to use the tool liberally. This makes sense, if you think about it. The Disavow tool gathers intelligence for Google regarding potentially bad backlink sources. If certain sites get reported very often, Google probably would act on those sites. Here's Cutts on the Disavow tool
Exactly, it's nothing more than a tool to snitch on sites that have been abused for link building. Don't count on it helping your SERPs.
Hi Nicky, I would like to pitch in and share my own experiences. We have an active account at Linkdetox, but won't recommend it too much. It's useful for some stuff, but won't only rely on it. Just to give you an example, it also marks as toxic even natural low quality links which definitely can't trigger a manual review and/or penalty. The tool also filters down backlinks a lot, more than supposed. I would prefer to get a dump from MajesticSEO for example and manually check these. As regarding the disavow tool, it depends what you aim to achieve here and your situation. If you don't have a manual penalty and you suspect you have been hit by Penguin, yes I would use it. Try to remove most of the offending links, disavow the rest and wait for next rollout. I seen positive results, which unfortunately can't share here. Let's face it, yes Google can use this data maybe against the sites you disavowed, but if you don't temper with the disavow file you should be fine. You removed the harmful links, you disavowed the rest, you're in "order". If you have a manual review today, Google will see some effort at least, much better than if you had done nothing imo!
yes, use disavow tool. the tool is built for negative seo attacks. if someone will intentionally create spam backlinks to your website...it does not means you need to contact webmasters each time someone create spam links to your website. he can't force you working on contacting the webmasters every time he wants . this is why disavow tool exist. but don't wait for a manual penalty message from google because the disavow tools will have NO effect in this case.
I'm also somewhat skeptical, however, I have seen some positive movement directly after a disavow submission. It's hard to say whether the movement was 100% a result of the disavow submission, but I wouldn't completely rule it out being useful.
I would suggest you to disavow the links. That's the option you have and its something which you can trust.
I have a directory that has been attached to my site for over 6 years. It has a PR 2 value showing. With all of Googles concern about spammy links do you think I should remove it? Or should I just remove it through Robots.txt entry?