After the introduction of Google Disavow Tool in 2012, its become one of the best instrument for website operators and digital marketers. It is the official method to remove spam backlinks from Google, heading towards your website.
Making backlinks through SEO for a website is great for ranking on Google and helps to make its own reputation on the market. SEO for a website works as a ‘Two sides of a coin’.
It has its own many advantages and many disadvantages. Advantages like: Gaining higher rank, increase in domain authority, having a good reputation in the market, and so on. But the disadvantage is there are also harmful Spam backlinks, spam backlinks can knock you out of the league.
Google may penalize your site for having too many spam backlinks, spam backlinks increase the spam score of a website, and if the score increases then the site may get in trouble. You can check out the spam score of your website.
When your website got too many spam backlinks, you’ll receive a notice (issue) from Google-like “unnatural links to your site”. After getting notice from Google in relation to backlinks, this issue must be addressed immediately otherwise it can impact the website’s position in Google Search Result.
Link cleanup and disavow is an easy process, but finding those spam backlinks connected to your website is a bit tricky. For finding those links Moz tool can be used.
Go to Moz Link Explorer, enter your domain name and Get a comprehensive analysis for the URL you entered, plus much more!
What is Google Disavow Tool?
Let learn in simple terms: if you ever heard about Google Panda then you probably know about the negativity and positivity of SEO. Leaving behind the Positivity, the negativity of SEO works in a very unnatural way for a website. Google has made it very clear that they will penalize sites involved in any spam linking.
Negative SEO:
Negative SEO Backlinks means receiving thousands of spammy backlinks in a short time of period from hundreds or thousands of low-quality websites. Doing this will start Google’s suspicion, potentially resulting in penality.
Past Spam Backlinks:
The most unfortunate scenario is faced when you know that your websites have bad backlinks but you’re not sure when they were built. To find these past spam backlinks a full backlink audit is needed, after finding the spam links publishers can Disavow spam links from Google Disavow Tool. Google will not count those backlinks to give rankings.
Publishers can use SEMrush & Ahrefs for full backlink audit.
Using Google Links Disavow tool, the publisher can tell Google that they don’t want some certain links from external sites to be counted as a backlink to rank web sites.
When to Disavow?
Doing manual action is one of the absolute methods when it comes to using the Disavow Tool to Remove Spam Backlinks From Google.
Only use Disavow tool when your website has a considerable number of spammy backlinks, artificial links, generated links, or low-quality links pointing towards your website.
Google works hard to make sure that any websites couldn’t be affected by linking from any spammy sites. For example, you or an SEO that you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate Google’s quality guidelines. First and foremost, Google recommends that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.
Backlinks From Expired Domains
While inspecting the website backlink database using backlink checker tools you may find a sum of 404 links that are called expired backlinks associating towards your website. Expired websites are those websites that have been dropped by their original operators or have been penalized by Google.
Such sites are universally auto-generated and therefore these sites are easier to spot and to filter, but to find the complete backlinks database some backlink examiners are free although some are paid.
Backlinks From Hacked Domains
Similar to expired domains, hacked backlinks are also bad for any website leaving no ranking on search engines. Hacked websites have unknowingly linked through injected code without the legitimate operator’s consent, which must be disavowed.
These kinds of backlinks are very easy to find and can easily be disavowed.
How to use Google’s Disavow Tool?
First, this feature is not for everyone to use. Make sure before using it, cause if you disavowed your quality backlinks then this may lead to invisibility and losing rank in the Google search engine. If you can remove links from spammy sites then it’s good, but if the issue is beyond your control, you can use this feature to get rid of spammy backlinks.
Especially those sites which are affected by Penguin updates should consider using the Google Disavow Links feature right away, Doing this stabilizes their reputation in eyes of Google.
The most difficult part of this process is creating a complete list of links that you need to disavow, for finding the backlinks pointing to your site by using the Google search console tool.
The most difficult part of this process is creating a complete list of links that you need to disavow, for finding the backlinks pointing to your site by using the Google search console tool.
Publishers can also use 3rd party backlink checker tools like SEMrush & Ahrefs which not only observes old backlinks but also allows you to see the all-time backlinks, new backlinks, and dead backlinks.
After getting the complete list of links, create a text file, and paste the link you want to disavow. If a website is sending too many spammy links to your site, you can simply use the root domain name: example.com in that text file to ignore links coming from the entire domain.
Now, go to the Google Disavow links page, select your domain name and click on Disavow Links.
On the next page, click on Disavow links again, it will open your file manager. Now select and upload the spam links .txt file you created.
Click on upload and submit. Congratulations you have successfully reported all spam backlinks to Google! You will get a confirmation from Google after uploading the Disavow file. (Remove Spam Backlinks From Google).
[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 Search results.]
Detailed Video By Matt Cutts
Here is a specific video by Matt Cuts, where he talks about the completely new features of Google’s Disavow Links.
As Matt Cutts mentioned in this video above, the Disavow tool is one of the best tools to get rid of spam backlinks easily, and we can expect a better version of this tool in near future. (Remove Spam Backlinks From Google)
FAQ (Questions & Answers)
No. The vast, vast majority of sites do not need to use this tool in any way. If you’re not sure what the tool does or whether you need to use it, you probably shouldn’t use it.
This tool allows you to indicate to Google which links you would like to disavow, and Google will typically ignore those links. Much like with rel=”canonical”, this is a strong suggestion rather than a directive – Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment for corner cases, for example – but Google will typically use that indication from you when assessing links.
Google need to recrawl and reindex the URLs you disavowed before your disavowals go into effect, which can take multiple weeks.
To modify which links you would like to ignore, download the current file of disavowed links, change it to include only links you would like to ignore, and then re-upload the file. Please allow time for the new file to propagate through Google’s crawling/indexing system, which can take several weeks
Final thoughts about Disavow Tool
Google Disavow Links Tool has given webmaster more further control over evaluating the links pointing to your site. That control was essential in the pre-penguin 4.0 era.
If you catch your spam backlinks at an early period, you can easily Disavow them.
If you find this article useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues who are into SEO or have websites.
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