Comment on Anchor Text SEO Test by SEO Dave.

SEO Tests Not completely sure of the question, think you are asking about an issue related to Google potentially penalizing a site for comment SPAM?

If you haven’t been comment spamming and not received a warning from Google about unnatural links or there’s nothing wrong with the links, disavowing links because you think Google doesn’t like blog comment links or links with good anchor text isn’t a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with backlinks with good SEO anchor text as long as there’s nothing wrong with the links: link farms, buying links, link spamming… those are penalty issues, good SEO anchor text per se isn’t.

If you have links with good anchor text because other webmasters like your site last thing you want to do is disavow them.

Note the above is based on NOT comment spamming, if you’ve been comment spamming it’s a different story.

Google ignores nofollow links, so even though you’ve spammed comments for links Google is already ignoring them. The nofollow links don’t pass any direct SEO benefit, not link benefit and no anchor text benefit: in effect the nofollow links are already disavowed by the owner of the domains the links are on.

Google doesn’t have a problem with webmasters buying nofollow links, they advise when buying links to only buy nofollow links. They give the same advise for those selling links as well, so safe to believe Google doesn’t have an issue with nofollow links.

If you haven been link spamming I’d be concerned at the links that do pass SEO benefit and what it says about your website. If you’ve resorted to link spamming, what else have you done that’s blackhat, if your backlink profile warrants a look from the Google manual review team it will be a black mark if they find thousands of spamm comments.

Since nofollow links pass no SEO benefit there’s no reason to or not to disavow them: from a direct SEO perspective makes no difference.

My advice if you’ve had a warning or know you’ve used a blackhat SEO technique disavow all** the spammed links (do follow and nofollow) and if you are carrying a manual penalty make a Reconsideration request admitting the “mistake” and what you’ve done to fix it. If you aren’t carrying a penalty no point making a Reconsideration request, your site isn’t currently carrying a manual penalty. If you have an automated penalty fixing the issue should help lift an automated penalty.

** I’d try not to disavow any do follow links that are particularly beneficial if you aren’t carrying a penalty, you can get away with a small amount of blackhat SEO :-) If you have a penalty be ruthless, they aren’t helping your site.

David