Has anyone had success disavowing old links or competitor spam links and should the disavow tool be used ONLY as a last resort?

[waqid]

One of our clients has some shady old links that we just recently discovered with a new link analysis tool. Not sure if they are harming the site or not but given the nature and verocity of the latest penguin updates we want to remove or negate their effects on the site asap.  Thanks

[waqid]

Thanks for the info Adam and Kevin.  Thomas, thanks for the removeem suggestion, I hadn't heard of that tool before but it looks great.

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you're looking for somebody to confirm Adams answer he's 100% correct. In addition there is a tool called removeem.com  that you may want to utilize it is manufactured by a company that is supported by Moz

[KevinBudzynski]

Great answer Adam. The key is try to manually reach out to webmasters who provides "spammy" links to your website to take them down.  Make a record of all correspondence (preferably in Google Docs) to these webmasters to use as proof of trying to comply w/Google's Guidelines.

[Adam_Cochran]

The disavow tool should not be your first result and it isn't a magic fix all button.

Before using the disavow tool you are expected to try and reach out to webmasters and make manual link removal requests to try and remove as many negative links as possible before using the disavow tool. After all you can't expect Google to just batch dump all the data it sees for your site otherwise their penalties would be worthless.

After that disavow the links, be honest and open in why the links are there and what caused them. If you are lying about it it will be pretty obvious and your disavow likely won't get granted; and if you have been doing something shady that wasn't yet caught it will be when your site is reviewed.

All in all if you have a clean white-hat campaign and have come under some link spam flack then using the disavow tool will be helpful. It's helped a few of my clients survive competitive negative SEO - however, sometimes this simply isn't enough. It won't fix everything, it won't remove all your links and it won't help against any manual penalties.

Once you've cleaned up as much as you can, and ensure you are employing white-hat SEO methods and have your facts in order give it a whirl and hope for the best. That's how the disavow tool plays out.