Google Disavow Link Tool allows you to request Google to remove certain URLs or domains from linking to your website. Irrelevant links to your website can hurt your rankings and using the Google Disavow Tool is a good way to tell Google to not to consider specific backlinks while indexing your website. It is considered as one of the effective ways to recover from negative SEO.
Google says,
“If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn’t enough”
clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn’t enough”
When to use Google Disavow Link Tool?
- You may have been hit by negative SEO
- Links pointing to your website that you do not want to be associated with.
- Your competitor may have submitted a spam report about you.
- You tried to remove links but webmaster linking to you is not removing links.
- You are afraid that site is affected by bad links
- The uploaded file has to be just a regular text file
- If there are lot many spammy links coming from one domain, it’s better to put the whole domain than putting each bad link per line.
- Need not to give extra details in the disavow text file.
- Log in to your Google account.
- Go to the Google Disavow Link Tool
- Select your site and click Disavow links
- Choose the file
- Click submit
Matt Cutts said that although the primary use of disavow tool is that you did bad SEO or hired a bad SEO who build bad links and you can’t get those links removed, but you can also use the tool in above cases as well or for other reason you feel the need of using it.
How to use Google Disavow Link Tool?
The Google Disavow File is a text file that includes all links that you want to be ignored by Google. You just need to make a text file and write the URLs you want to get rid of. Upload that text file to the tool.
For instance, you want to ignore the links coming from a specific domain that looks spammy, let’s say www.example.com, you need to write “domain: example.com” and all backlinks coming from there will be ignored.
Important Things to Consider
Understanding Google’s warning
When you access the Google Disavow Link Tool, a message appears which says,
This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.
This warning is issued because disavowing links without making the effort to remove them first is dangerous. Google provides this warning on the entry point to the Disavow Tool.
Process
The Final Words
The Google Disavow Toolis an important step towards protecting your website against spammy links. It is a way to help your site reach new heights of ranking and traffic.
Do you use Google Disavow Tool? What would like to add to this story? Share your views in the comment section below.