Consensus on disavowing low-quality auto-generated links (e.g. webstatsdomain.org etc) ?
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Is there a consensus in the SEO world around the best practice on how to treat the multiple auto-generated links for a domain? With a lot of the link profiles we have been analyzing nearly 70% volume of the backlinks relate to these auto generated links (e.g. similarweb.com, informer.com, webstatsdomain.org etc)
I can see arguments for disavowing them (low-quality links) as well as keeping them (skew anchor text distribution towards URL mentions, natural link profile) but would be interested if people have run experiments or prefer strongly one way or the other.
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I ignore those junk links. I figure that Google is pretty clear that disavow tool is only for extreme cases. ["In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."]
That being said, I do notice that many people talk about routinely disavowing low-quality links even when there is no penalty in play. It seems to me that that in itself could create an unnatural link profile—after all, if you just let your link growth happen naturally, you'd have those types of links accumulating.
I too would be interested in hearing more about what people choose to do (or not) about bad links that arrive uninvited...
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You don't need to disavow these. The disavow tool is meant to be used so that you can ask Google not to count link that you made in an effort to manipulate the search engine results. These pages link to everyone, and Google knows it. I just ignore them when I'm doing my link audits.
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I actually never had any trouble with them so Ive never disavowed them UNLESS im working on a penalized site. I dont have second thoughts and just throw them in there. They have no effect at all besides messing up your stats anyway.
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