If anybody ends up searching for this topic please view this Whiteboard Friday with Rand. I think he actually ended up reading my question and answering it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3mxJnA8Zk

Thank you for the feedback everybody.

You all make good points. I'm not facing an active penalty and I'm just trying to be proactive. All the links were organic in nature and there is no indication that black-hat backlink building has been performed on the websites that I'm optimizing. I think that too many SEOs have used the Disavow Tool as a proactive measure so I don't believe that Google will set us up in a trap for using it. My thought process was that I want to start with technical SEO, get the sites healthy on the back-end then implement a content marketing strategy that's been in the works for some time.

That being said, I think that I'll hold off on the disavow until I gather more information or read up on studies that have been performed regarding proactive disavow. If anybody has any insight on this please post it here as I am sure would be appreciated by all.

Cheers

Hey everybody,

I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do?

For example:
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

and

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/17