From another WebmasterWorld thread this question stirred up a lot of thoughts about Disavow that I decided it needed to be addressed on a post of it's own.
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Whitey said:
Why are so many SEO's recommending to their clients to send out unnecessary emails to remove links. This is a giant expensive waste of time and based on a myth. Or I wonder if I have got it completely wrong. I think clarity from Google is needed.
For starters there's a couple of problems with this line of thinking:
DISAVOW IS PROPRIETARY As it sits, disavow locks you into Google only, it's a lot of work and expense just cow-towing to one SE and I refuse to do it.
The whole world doesn't revolve around Google, getting close, but to date it doesn't.
The reason you need to send emails to get links removed is because DISAVOW doesn't mean squat to the rest of the world because unlike other techniques, such as sitemaps, this is proprietary to Google and cannot be seen by any other search engine.
BOT BLOCKING TO STOP BAD LINKS You might not have to send emails if they aren't allowed to scrape your site in the first place.
Scrapers make bad links to sites in large volumes and it takes a lot less effort to simply block them than it does to get rid of their links after the fact. You can't write to webmasters running scraper sites as they don't provide email addresses and if they did, you would probably end up in a new spammers address book.
So you can block them, or attempt to send emails (bad idea), or disavow them, but the first option is the best time and money spent here.
STOP BUYING LINKS People were warned not to do this from way back in the early days of Google. People denied any claims, even with B&W examples, of how Google could detect these links. Back then, Matt Cutts and his team were wiping them out by hand when they were uncovered.
However, it was explained how they could do it as Google's grasp on the web grew it was trivial, and eventually it happened. There's still loopholes where Google can't easily detect paid links, but it's rapidly closing in and eventually it will be nearly impossible short of getting links from other "white hat" sites, assuming they will stoop to selling them.
Many people failed to heed the warnings and now that the other shoe has dropped are scrambling to disavow those very links. Not that everyone doing disavow did this, but I know a lot that did and they're paying way more to get rid of those links in terms of time and money than they did to get them in the first place.
Sending emails to get these removed will often end up with a new price tag associated with removing that link which is often more than you paid to get it in the first place! Based on the types selling those links, you might expect them to double dip and sell your email address to spammers so beware, use a burner email account.
AVOID MOST DIRECTORIES - PAID OR NOT Some directories are the real deal in business to help people find stuff, use those. Avoid all the rest like the plaque for many of the same reasons as buying links, even the free ones. I've heard they now charge to remove links which can exceed the amount to get them in the first place.
Check their reputation before adding your links and DO NOT use those tools to get a ton of directory listings all at once. Those mass submission sites and tools were a bad idea since the web was invented and the bad karma they created is coming back to bite many that fell for them.
CREATE A DISAVOW XML STANDARD ADOPTED BY ALL The search engines to all agree on a single disavow standard they'll all use as feeding this information specifically to Google is a big waste of time and gives Google a bigger advantage over the rest by keeping it all private.
If you could add disavow files to your site, such as a file "disavow-urls-xxxxxxx.xml" that all SEs could use, then I'd be all over using disavow. But how it's currently implemented, I won't touch it.
PUSH BACK ON GOOGLE'S PROPRIETARY WEB People have to stop buying into all this proprietary junk. Google is making people jump through hoops to use these things that have no value anywhere else. You would be better off IMO to just change your domain name and move the content than play whack-a-mole with previous bad links and the endless game of disavow.
DISAVOW - IT'S A TRAP! The problem with disavow is by doing it you admit you did something wrong in the first place.
Since I never asked for any links or posted my links anywhere they shouldn't belong, then I don't feel the need to disavow anything, If weird links exist it's because somebody else did it and it's not my doing. Since I never was involved with creating the link I don't feel I should get involved with it now.
Not my link, not my problem, not going to set foot in this trap.
DISAVOW ISN'T THE ONLY ISSUE People get so obsessed with links alone that they ignore the possibility that there are other factors keeping their site from ranking as it once did. Perhaps it's on site SEO problems, or maybe the lack of mobile in some categories.
What happened in one of my niches, which was providing local information, is Google promoted all the sites in that niche with Google places. All those local sites suddenly appeared above me and all my competitors and left us in the dust, usually 30+ in the listings. The site still ranks top 10 for some keywords, just not local listings, so it's not a penalty whatsoever, but an algo change. If certain competitors had a similar issue, you might want to compare all the sites impacted to see what's in common.
UPDATE TIME Lastly, depending on what caused your site to drop, you may have it fixed, it may be re-included, in may be just fine but you may not find out until they rerun whatever algo dropped you in the first place. Some things DO NOT change daily, weekly or even monthly and in the meantime people are thrashing about making all sorts of crazy changes that may make the situation worse, not better. When it comes to patience and a waiting game, certain slgo update periods have made fixing your problem almost impossible and testing has become a glacially slow process.
It's often easier after an extended period of time to simply bail.
EGGS IN ONE BASKET Because of all the complexity of the modern Google it cannot be said longly and loudly enough to spread your content creation efforts around to multiple sites, multiple niches. Preferably as far away from each other as possible to avoid a sudden change in a niche or some algo ranking that would take out all your sites at once.
MARKETING PLAN If your plan bases more than 50% of your traffic on Google alone it's doomed to failure and should incorporate other strategies such as PPC, social, pinterest, mobile apps, encourage bookmarks, etc.. When I say PPC, don't narrowly think AdWords as Twitter and Facebook can both be good sources of traffic as well. But there has to be a more robust plan in place other than free SEO traffic. Also, make sure you rank well in Bing, Yandex, etc. so you're poised to survive the worst.
There's probably more, but I ran out of time to write it all down and these posts have a byte limit. ;)
Good luck!
