Last updated on November 21st, 2012
Last month at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts announced the creation of a new tool to disavow links. When news of this tool was released, many a search engine optimization firm jumped in alarm as to how this would affect their hard fought gains in the search engines.
First a quick review of links – Google and other search engines use links as a signal to determine how reputable and important a particular webpage is, be it an article, a landing page, a blog post or even a press release.
Links serve as the basis of PageRank, which is one of many tools the search giant depends on to determine rankings. However, PageRank is open to all sorts of manipulation on the part of spammers, so Google manually reviews many of the sites it thinks has suspicious links pointing to it.
According to a description from Google, the disavow links tool is for sites who’ve been notified of a manual spam action based on “unnatural links” pointing to the site in question. Unnatural links include paid links, link exchanges or other link building methods that violate the search giant’s quality guidelines.
See a sample screenshot of this manual spam action/unnatural links notice from Google:
If your website receives this kind of warning from Google, you should work to remove as many of the offending spammy or low-quality links as possible. Some of these links though may be out of your control, which is where the Disavow tool comes in.
The Disavow tool basically allows you to suggest to Google the links you believe may be harming your rankings. The search engine will then take this information and decide whether it will ignore, or disavow, the links you believe are harming your rankings. Notice we say “suggest” since Google isn’t obligated to dump the links, which is essentially the same way the “rel:canonical” tag works.
According to Google’s announcement, the search giant considers the disavow request as a “strong suggestion” rather than a directive.
Also, Google does say that the vast, vast majority of sites will never have a need for a tool like this. In its announcement, they clearly say that if you’re not sure what the tool does or whether you need to use it, you probably shouldn’t use it.
In fact, a report from Search Engine Journal discussing the new tool suggests you avoid the disavow links tool altogether, except under some very limited circumstances. First of all, even the most minor mistake in your text file that you send to Google can lead to disastrous consequences.
What if you accidentally enter a site that’s sending lots of good links your way?
If your site is large and has a relatively complex link scheme, this is entirely possible.
Also, identifying these “diseased” links can be very time consuming. If you go to the trouble to identify them and Google ends up indexing them anyway, you would have wasted your time.
With that said, SEJ’s report does list a few circumstances where the Disavow tool may be useful, which include:
1. If your site lost rankings due to the Penguin update and you haven’t been able to recover, even though you’ve worked tirelessly with external site owners to remove low value back links. If you were affected by Penguin, your site would have experienced a sharp drop in rankings in late April or early May of this year.
2. Requests to Google following post-Penguin cleanup have been denied.
3. Google has sent you an unnatural link notice but you’ve been unable to clean up the links you’ve identified.
4. You can prove without a doubt that your site has been the victim of a negative SEO attack. Although many point to this as a source of their problems, it’s extremely rare.
5. If you’re an experienced enough SEO who can spot low value backlinks quickly and effectively.
Unless you fall into one of these 5 categories, your time will be better spent building better quality links or working with link partners to modify existing links. Again, if you’ve been meticulous with your link building and only work with reputable sites, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about from Google in the first place.
How about you…have you received any unnatural link notices from Google?
If so, did any of these bad links affect your rankings?
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