Should I disavow this link?

[wilkinsj]

Hi everyone

I am working on a link audit for a website and I've come across a difficult situation.

A <powerful niche website> added a link to my client's site from their article here:
<snip>

This is a great link. No manipulative anchor text, its curated by a real human being, and its in an article with a related subject. However...

This <niche website> is run by <an apparently large organization in the niche>, and their articles are automatically syndicated on hundreds of their members' sites. So the article has been syndicated across all these other sites that are managed by the same company. Moreover, they have not used rel=canonical to link them back to original.

<snip>

My questions are:
1. Is there any Pagerank value to these links, or will Google just discount them as duplicate content?
2. Will Google realize that these links are not manipulative?
3. Should I just disavow them all? I hate to lose the links, but I don't want my client to get caught in Penguin 3.0. They have created a huge 'unnatural-looking' spike in inbound links.

Thanks in advance!
W

[edited by: goodroi at 6:08 pm (utc) on Sep 14, 2014]
[edit reason] Please no links till you reach more senior membership level [/edit]
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:03 pm (utc) on Sep 14, 2014]
[edit reason] also removed organization name and niche [/edit]

[aakk9999]

If you have just one (or just a few) links being distributed around by article being republished, that is, there were no other linking activities that would leave worrying footprint, then I would not worry. You said yourself the anchor was not manipulative.

[Robert Charlton]

wilkinsj - This quote (among other things) in your post would raise my suspicions about the entire setup....

My emphasis added...

So the article has been syndicated across all these other sites that are managed by the same company.

It sounds like this organization together with its various websites might be an elaborate linking scheme.

Forget the idea of linking for PageRank. At this point, you should be more concerned about factors of trust. I can understand not wanting to disavow links that might help your client, but I think the setup you describe does have a lot of potential to hurt.

If this is a small network that doesn't even create unique content for its individual sites, you might want to check out how original that article is in the first place. Even if the wording is unique, is it, say, "highly derivative"? Also, what is the reason that they are linking to your client?

The big PITA question is whether Google can figure out that you had nothing to do with placing the link in the first place... and that may have to do with what your client's other inbound links are like.

[wilkinsj]

Thanks for the valuable tips guys.

I searched for a paragraph of the article in Google and only found the original URL. That suggests to me that the syndicated articles are not getting indexed, and Google recognizes them for what they are.

However, eventually I decided to disavow all but the original article. The distortion of the link profile and the possibility of an algo not recognizing this just scared me too much. So we've taken the safer route.