Should I disavow 500,000 links from xx.wikipedia.org and clones?

[guarriman3]

Hi,

I manage a database with thousands of Animal and Botanical records, creating a website with 300k URLs.

I've just found (through Google Search Console and some tools that analyze the referring domains) that I've got:
- 200k links to my website from 'xx.wikipedia.org' ('xx' is a language with more than 5 million speakers). It seems that someone used a bot to create thousands of Wikipedia pages, linking to my website at the bottom of all of the pages (with a nofollow link, as in all Wikipedia pages).
- 300k links to my website from some Wikipedia clones, through a diverse number of languages. It seems that all of them are nofollow links, as well.

I've been browsing (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487) the Google's webpage dealing with disavowing links to our sites, and now I wondered if I should do it or not.

Any similar experience is appreciated. Thank you.

[not2easy]

Do not bother. They will disappear on their own though it may take a little time. If you spent no money or effort to acquire the links, you are not required to disavow them either. Yes, it is aggravating.

[guarriman3]

Hi @not2easy, thank you very much for your nice answer.

I initially had no intention of disavowing them because, as you say, I have not paid for them or made any effort to get them.

However, I am concerned about the high number of existing links, which may raise some alarm bells in the Google's algorithm.

They will disappear on their own though it may take a little time.

I've just checked some links through archive.org's Wayback Machine, and 100% of the checked links exist since 2018. I'm not sure whether they will disappear on their own though. Someone created them with a bot and, for a language of 5-6 million speakers, there is no one who will remove them from the Wikipedia.

[not2easy]

They may not be gone but they will not continue to be seen as related to your own site. From my own experience I have seen huge numbers of links in GSC and after a few weeks they went away from GSC.

This is not to say that they no longer exist (though I've seen that some do and some do not continue to exist online). Over time they are seen as what they are (not having the characteristics of true intentional links) and they fall away from your GSC views without any effect on your site either positive or negative.

If the links are from a different language site especially they will not be seen as beneficial for the visitors of that site or your site.

[JesterMagic]

In the last few years John Mueller from Google has said multiple times do not use the disavow tool. The search engine itself will disregard bad links.

I think the only reason you would use the tool now is if you have a manual action against your site and you need to disavow any links you created that are against the guidelines.

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