Disavowing internal backlinks

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: Geeze, don`t disavow all those links!
  
  Take the PageRank and run with it. So what if you don`t have anchor text to work with? That probably makes the links safer.
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  Ross Raffin: I wasn`t precise enough: there are 201, 000 links coming from 7 domains, all with the anchor text "advertise." The seven domains are X Corp`s newspapers.
  
  The page is not ranking for any keywords in the top 50.
  
  It isn`t even ranking its own homepage for a branded query.
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  Michael Martinez: Ross Raffin If the business relationship between the 8 domains is obvious I don`t think the links are causing any problems. The search engines say they would ignore them.
  
  But you could try an experiment and disavow 1 domain, wait about a month, and see if anything moves.
  
  If you see improvement then disavow 2 more domains, wait about another month, and see if anything moves.
  
  If after you disavow the first domain nothing changes you have to decide "all or nothing". Either disavow all 6 remaining domains or undo the first disavow.
  
  Based only on what you`ve described above, my instinct would be NOT to disavow any or all 7 domains.
  
  With 201, 000 sitewide footer links coming from 7 co-owned domains, if there is no manual action notice in Google Search Console then I seriously doubt there is anything bad happening because of those links.
  
  They may not be passing any PageRank at all. If that is the case then disavowing them won`t hurt anything (but you`ll never get any PageRank from any other links on those domains).
  
  If, however, even only minute fractions of PageRank are being allowed to pass, you`ll just make your job harder if you disavow those 7 co-owned domains.
  
  Based only on what you`ve shared so far, I don`t see a compelling reason to even do a disavow test with 1 domain.
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: I agree with Michael... don`t kill things. Most everyone links to their parent company or subsidiaries in the footer or wherever.
  
  Structured Data can help establishing the structure and relationship of entities within a corporation too - and if you can establish that, then all those links have context. They may not help rank for "media" related searches if X Media is X Corp`s only media property, but they`ll help it for brand searches. That structured data helps set up X Media and X Corp as brand entities and gives them some context and a frame to build off of, also.
  
  If the other sites are all subsidiaries and part of the same network of companies within a single parent organization - structure up the whole thing.
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  Ammon Johns: No.