Disavowing great links with commercial anchor text

[Whitey]

I was looking for feedback on how folks were handling link clean ups with great links, but with commercial anchor text in them.

Did you

a) cut / disavow irrespective
b) send a notification to ask the anchor text to be changed
c) something else

... and why? Thoughts ?

[aristotle]

By "great links", I suppose you mean un-solicited natural backlinks that are from authority sites and that send you significant traffic. There must be something wrong with Google's algorithm if these kind of links would harm your sites rankings, regardless of the anchor text.

[bwnbwn]

c) something else

This link crap has gotten just plain out of hand. I would forget the tool and work on additional unsolicited links.

Kind of obvious now if your still soliciting links with anchor text, or your still looking for a link exchange, or your still submitting to directories, or your still adding duplicate content to article databases, or your stuffing text, or a 100 other common mistakes many tend to make when launching or having website work done by an outside/inside source.

Pretty obvious your not in touch with the new world order.
NOTE Not directed at you Whitey--- Just a rant. I am totally fed up with this link crap and all the people that have gone overboard with it.

It is just like the 2003-2011 years. All about links
2012-2013 all about figuring how to get rid of the links you built.

All about control and it seems to be working very well.

[n0tSEO]

If these 'great links' are getting you great target traffic and conversions, then I'd go for

b) send a notification to ask the anchor text to be changed

Actually, I would suggest that you leave the choice of an anchor text to the webmaster, as that would help making it look natural. If the webmaster has no clue of another way to link back to you, you may suggest using a brand name or your website URL.

[Robert Charlton]

Disavowing great links

If these were truly "great" links, they wouldn't need disavowing. Were these links actually natural, or was there some coordination? How much coordination?

It sounds like "great" here might mean links which cover a lot of SEO-attractive factors on a check-list (if only the target site hadn't done too many of them ;) ). That is neither "great" nor natural. It's simply playing games with a lot of fuzzy lines. "Great" links of course aren't likely to be negative SEO, so IMO it's a question of which links you yourself engineered and controlled.

b) send a notification to ask the anchor text to be changed

Changing anchor text on links from domains that worked with you to place the links is an attempt to rewrite a history that Google already knows. Remember that machete? IMO, this is the time to use it.

I wouldn't touch anchor text that you got naturally and did not control.

Possibly difficult, though... situations where an SEO buddy was "helping" you, giving you anchor text you really didn't ask for, but knowing what you might have asked for. Depends on how many friends you have who think they're aware of more factors than Google is.

[aristotle]

Robert Charlton
In trying to read between the lines of the OP's post, it occurred to me that this might be a case in which a lot of unnatuaral link-building was done using "commercial" anchor text, and then the site later picked an un-solicited purely-natural backlink from an authority site that has the same commercial anchor text.

But this whole business of Google's algorithm demoting sites for perceived artificial link building is fundamentally flawed. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic relevance, quality, or usefulness of a site's pages, which is what should be the basis for assigning rankings, and it also opens up the realistic possibily of negative SEO. There's a lot more that could be said here, but to sum it up, Google's search results have been badly damaged, and some webmasters have spent a lot of time working on backlink profiles instead of working on improving their websites.

[Whitey]

The OP was really me scouting out whether anyone had confronted this angle carefully when disavowing.

In the past, it would be a common practice to target sites that could reference a site which would meet it's audiences needs. So for example, if you supplied tools to a trade that were unique to your site, then you might contact an authority in that trade with a site and say " Hey - how about referring a link to us ", and supply a suggested anchor text for them to refer to your site with. A simple marketing / sales approach. That's OK in paid search, but maybe not anymore in organic search influence - I mean there are degrees of course.

Now if that anchor text aligns with a whole bunch of others of the same, and many of those were low quality and spam, there are clear issues with over optimization, and a pattern / history which Google may be factoring in. That's really the context of my OP

But as I often do [ sorry ], I was deliberately vague to see what fish we would haul up in the nets to see what's in the catch to form some perspective.

Asking someone to adjust the link text is strictly speaking unnatural link manipulation and/or interference of sorts, BUT ...........

Would love to hear some more views about this.