During the breakfast keynote at Pubcon last week with Gary Illyes and Eric Enge, one of the questions came up about about real time Penguin, since Penguin now discounts bad links – he asked specifically how the new Penguin affects the disavow tool.

First, the question:

My question is about the Penguin update, where you’re discounting bad links.  How does that impact the disavow tool, should you still do that?  Or is it basically…

Gary Illyes’ response:

Yes, you should use it, yep, you should use it.

A few people have been pretty vocal that people should no longer use the disavow tool and suggesting that all disavow files should be removed. And this despite Google repeatedly stating that this is a particularly bad strategy and that Penguin did not change their disavow recommendations.

Removing disavows can also have other unintended consequences well beyond Penguin.  Google has also been clear that Google uses links for other parts of the Google search algo – presumably including the bad links too – and that site owners should still disavow links as needed.  And if a link was placed in a disavow for Penguin reasons, those links would be very likely to result in a link based manual action too.

Bottom line, continue using the disavow tool as needed, Penguin shouldn’t change how site owners utilize the tool.