Google recently launched the Disavow Tool in October 2012 for website owners and webmasters that were affected adversely by their new Penguin update. This vital tool allowed them to disavow bad links that were responsible for poor rankings as per Google’s new search engine algorithm.
However, now Google states that merely disavowing bad links with link-removal requests is not enough. The company wants you to manually remove low quality and spam links too along with your request to indicate to Google that you are serious about getting rid of bad links to your website.
This presents a rather curious situation since the main aim of submitting disavow request was to get rid of bad links. With Google instructing users to manually remove bad links, the very purpose of the tool seems to be negated. On the other hand, Google needs to confirm that you are indeed serious about bad links and are taking manual action as well as putting in requests to disavow bad links at the same time.
Even though this theory seems to be confusing, it might lead to improved results in your bid to clean your website of bad external links. If your website has been penalized or if your disavow requests have been ignored then you could consider manually removing bad links since the disavow tool could be monitoring your manual removal efforts before taking similar action.
Since you will need to adapt to Google’s new algorithms it would be best to take manual action while requesting to disavow links to ensure that Google follows up on your request. At the end of the exercise, your main aim should be to achieve high rankings irrespective of whether that action is taken by a robot or by appropriate staff overseeing the disavow tool rather than face punitive action from Google.
If you want Google to take positive action on your disavow requests as well as avoid repeated requests for the same links then manual removal of a few bad links should be high on your priority list. Monitor your requests and rankings to know if the Penguin update is rewarding you for your positive efforts.