To disavow or not to disavow.

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

• 
  Tony McCreath: I was just checking my backlinks and spotted one that was quite random.
  
  It was in a spun article and I presume the random link with a random keyword was in there to try and make the article look more legitimate.
  
  What should I do? Disavow and forget about it?
• 
  Collin Davis: I think if it is the odd link and not a negative SEO attack, I think it should be good.
  
  One of the things I would suggest that you do is to check in Majestic SEO when the links were discovered. If you are seeing a huge spike in links in any specific month compared to what you might have built, it might signify a negative attack but else I think this shouldn't be much to worry about.
• 
  Blade S: Could you post the link where you've found that?
• 
  Dave Elliott: I'd disavow and forget. 
• 
  Tony McCreath: www(dot)thouartjules(dot)com/a-simple-guide-to-seo-tools/
• 
  Blade S: +Tony McCreath
  Ok, I took a quick look.
  
  It's not all of it a spun article... What they did there is to quote another site's article, which is not good, of course, because that article is quite big, so it's a duplicate. If you check the page source you'll see they've used <blockquote>.
  
  I think the rest of the content is written by them, so it's kind of a half-spun article :).
  
  The bad news is that, from what I've seen, the site is from 2012 or something, and they don't have any PR and their DA is low (17). If it was a new website, I would have told you to leave the backlink, but in this case I would advise you to disavow it, just to be sure.
• 
  Tony McCreath: +Blade S ;I'd argue about the non spin. It's quite easy to see most sentences make no sense but would if the words had not been switched via a thesaurus.
  
  You're right that they also stole content from ;iquantum(dot)com without any spinning.
  
  The article dates itself recently which makes sense as it links to my ssl domain that has only been live for a few months.
  
  It has the honour of being my first disavowed domain since I switched domains.
• 
  Blade S: +Tony McCreath I haven't really read the article, just took a quick look and saw that big quote with the source. You're probably right.
  
  I disavowed my first link 3 months ago, and it's still indexed. The disavow process is such a frustrating waiting game... you don't even know if it will eventually disavow the links. Sometimes it doesn't disavow them at all, for don't know what reason.
• 
  Tony McCreath: disavow does not remove a page from the index nor have it removed from the backlink report.
  
  Think of it as getting the link nofollowed the next time google crawls it. Thus getting it removed from algorithms such as PageRank and Penguin.
• 
  Blade S: I meant my backlinks index/report. And I don't know where I read that the disavowed backlinks will disappear from Webmaster Tools, which is wrong. It just adds an invisible nofollow tag to the backlinks.
  
  It doesn't even make sense to take them out from the Webmaster Tools, now that I think about it.
  
  Got some misinformation there... thanks for pointing that out.
  
  Anyway, the disavow process is long. Even Matt Cutts said it can take several months.