General rule for disavowing - What makes link "bad"?

[onlinesource]

I been working with a so-called SEO expert who has disavowed nearly every link under the sun and I'm a bit confused. I keep getting mixed information about what makes one back link bad, another good. I also tried my luck at link detox software to scan through links and tell me which one's are bad and good. A lot of the report seems very generic but it does concern me about what GOogle sees because obviously Google is a computer with generic things it looks for to cause flags.

1. Everybody says side-wide links are bad. I get that a link on the sidebar or the footer of a site that is 1,000+ pages deep, results 1,000+ backlinks and looks spammy. In a prefect world I'd rather just get a link if on a sidebar or footer to be on the homepage only, right or a better yet a single article? BUT what about blogspot accounts or wordpress pages with blogrolls. Blogrolls appear on every page and I notice that a lot of toxic reports don't catch them. Are blogrolls overlooked because they are SUPPOSE to be on every page vs a webmaster simply putting a link to my site in a sidebar or footer?

2. Speaking of site-wide, I notice links that appear multiple times because the original article comes up in the author's feed, category feed, tag feed, etc it says link is listed multiple times. Even if the original site owner isn't not smart enough to NOINDEX his tag, category, author feeds, should I assume that Google will over look these additional links and consider it SAFE and not toxic?

[aakk9999]

1. I think Google is quite good at figuring out site-wide links and discounting them. When they became bad is when you have many of them with the same / similar money anchor as it would strongly indicate this was done for link building purpose. Also, if you have sitewide from a page that gives sitewide links to many other sites that could even be completely unrelated. So I would not worry too much about blogrolls.

2. I think that by now Google can figure out multiplication of links because of author's feed, category feed, etc. as there is a clear pattern and easy recognition of these so I would not worry about these.

[Storiale]

Great Questions: Google doesn't punish a site for having a site-wide backlink. They recognize it and stop the "credit" at a certain point. It might get credit for being 1 link, but they have said explicity that site-wide links are not considered spam or black hat. Same for your second question.

Google is looking for the following types of scams: many many footer links (site-wide) with the same anchor text. Blog rolls are considered different.
Poor quality sites that have many site-wide links (can be seen as paid links). Paid Links without "no-follow" attribute, Being listed on many cheap low quality directories, Undeclared advertising with banner ads or images, creating duplicate sites with different domain names with links back to the original site, and that type of thing (this is not the full list).

Google even recognizes when someone Scrapes your site content but the idiots leave your internal links on the page... those inbound links are not used against you.

Part of the scam is that people create multiple sites and link back to 1 site - but they manage all the sites under the same google account/analytics account (Yeah, not too hard to figure out who owns the site when they are all managed under one account)... Also networks using the same IP address, etc. That type of thing.

If you had policies and practices to create that type of stuff, then I could see why he/she would disavow. But blog roll links and that type of issue isn't necessary and could hurt your site. Don't panic! Wait 2 months if your rankings go down, then he likely over did it. If your ranking goes up, then he did a good job.

You can always take those sites off the disavow list if you experience bad results.

[nomis5]

My view is that at a single site level disavowing has zero effect. G are not going to allow you to control what links to your site they take into account or don't.

I think G uses the disavow information almost exclusively to get a general picture of what websites might be bad. If 10,000 website owners disavow one particular site, G will effectively downgrade that website in their SERPS.

But as for affecting YOUR website, disavowing, in my opinion has no effect whatsoever.