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Using Google’s new ‘disavow’ tool for bad backlinks

If you’ve been following our regular SEO updates, you will have seen our article on the importance of quality backlinks to your site and checking these on a regular basis. Although they have always been an integral part of “white hat” search engine optimisation, Google’s recent release of the Penguin update brought backlinks back into focus for webmasters, as the search engine began to count bad links as a negative ranking signal. This meant that websites that purchased backlinks or gained them through spamming (blog comment spam, forum profile backlinks etc.) were penalised. While this was good news for those sites that regularly add high quality and unique page content, it led many site owners to worry that competitors, “trolls” etc might deliberately create bad backlinks to their websites to try to harm their rankings. Google’s new disavow link tool This new tool from Google goes some way to allaying those fears, as it enables webmasters to specify that certain links should not be counted when crawled by the search engine’s spiders. This tool therefore gives webmasters back a level of control, as Google will then typically ignore the flagged links. NOTE: When you inform Google about bad links, it sees this as a strong suggestion rather than a directive. It is also worth noting that, after submitting the links, it will typically take several weeks to process the request. For those of you who have been unlucky enough to have a manual action on your site as a result of bad backlinks, remember that you still need to file a reconsideration request to get this revoked - it is not enough just to submit the links. This tool is more about ongoing maintenance of your quality backlinks. Use the tool with discretion! Think carefully before using the disavow tool - it is not the answer to all SEO ills! The first course of action for bad backlinks should always be to try to remove them from the web. Where this is not possible (i.e. because they have been generated by a third party), then think about using the tool. It is always possible to make mistakes in the process of telling Google to ignore links to your site, so approach use of the tool with caution! It is primarily for people who have actively used “spammy” backlink techniques in the past, or have had bad backlinks imposed upon them by others. If you haven’t used your own SEO or used random link networks that you found on SEO forums in the past, this is probably not something that you should be using.