SEN MasterMind Benjamin #5 — Serial LB31939529V

The SEN MasterMind Gem Of The Month
for June 2017 is hereby awarded to:
Jane Hogan

This past month, our SEN MasterMind Superstars chimed in with a wealth of Information. Superstars like Keith Saye, Andrew Cann, John Heard, Casey Markee, Mary Bowling all made major contributions to the SEN MasterMind.

As always though, the MasterMind conversations begin with a question. And this month's GEM of a question went like this...

Jane: A toxic link question. I have recently followed the recommendation of SEMRush and disavowed some "toxic links" The loss of these so called "toxic links" has negatively impacted my search results. I read recently that Google now tells you to reverse the disavow if the happens. My question is - why risk disavowing potential toxic links if this is the case? Surely you can just disavow if and when you get a penalty. These links are still marked as toxic - should I now risk reversing them as Google suggests?

Casey: Hi Jane, the answer to your question really lies in "education." Tools screw up "toxicity rules" all the time. As a professional link auditor I can tell you that I have individually ignore rules all the time.

For tools like these to work they have to rely on "rigid rules" that don't always work correctly. So if all you did was "disavow links" based on a tool without you understanding what a quality link looks like, then yes, that can hurt you.

We have a good guide on understanding link quality located here. It's well worth a look.

Most likely, you probably didn't need to disavow the links in the first place. Because you are right, Google has done a M...