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A comment on Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO by thomk on Monday March 20, 2017 @12:55PM (#13915697)
I have heard that disavowing is actually not a good practice because you can hurt your own ranking without much benefit (if there isn't a problem).
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Re:Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO by bhartzer on Monday March 20, 2017 @06:11PM (#13918095)
If you don't know what you're doing then disavowing can hurt rankings.

But if you know what you're doing, disavow is awesome. It works.

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Re:Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO by walshemj on Monday March 20, 2017 @08:05PM (#13918736)
seconded disavow is a powerful tool but not to be used lightly
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Re:Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO by appleiigs on Monday March 20, 2017 @06:04PM (#13918051)
Disavowing definitely hurt my website. I disavowed a handful of the most spammy links and I dropped from the consistently 2nd search result to 4th quickly. I "un-disavowed" and now back to 3rd.

Problem for me was I didn't know if I was getting hurt by the spammy links or not. You don't know if you have a problem or not.

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Re:Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO by austenallred on Monday March 20, 2017 @01:20PM (#13915917)
True if there isn't a problem. But most sites nowadays have problems.

The tricky part is links that look spammy to you can be viewed by Google as legitimate. So as a practice I only disavow the spammiest of spammy links.

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