Matt Cutts Advocates Aggressive Disavowal of Bad Links

Matt Cutts, Google's authority on SEO, released a video explaining how web owners can disavow links in order for penalized sites to get a fresh new start. He says that anyone who has hired a SEO company that resulted in bad links can use the disavow tool aggressively. In some cases website owners may want to disavow entire months or years of bad links, depending on how sever they have impacted your site. Bad links  There are many different kinds of bad links, but most of them relate to low quality or a bad attempt to buy popularity. Linking to sites with thin content or that are flooded with ads is an excellent example of bad links. Even though an SEO company is supposed to know better than to link to such sites, it can happen to inexperienced companies. Other bad links include links to malicious software, sites full of random links and links to "no page found" messages. Google tends to penalize spammers. Link spamming is when groups of websites all become interlinked with no real relevance or connection with useful content. Google considers buying and selling links to be grounds for penalties. Cutts says over time the actions Google takes are more severe for repeat violators.
Disavow Tool When website owners disavow a large amount of links over a certain time frame, it tells Google they are willing to make radical changes to become compliant. It's a way of documenting bad advice from an SEO and taking steps toward reconsideration. Cutts does not recommend that every web owner should begin disavowing every link on their sites, but mentions that this is what many owners do after they purchase a site.
Reducing Web Spam One of the main themes that remains important to search engine optimization is to limit the amount of spam on the internet. It's important for every website owner to know that every page should have value to its users. Furthermore, every link on the site should go to a useful page as well. The more a website behaves in this manner, the less the owner has to worry about. Outgoing links should always go to credible authoritative sites.