Disavow Links – The much awaited Google WMT option is now live

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 10/17/2012 6903 Views

Google announced the launch of the new disavow link tool

Disavow Tool

Matt Cutts officially announced the launch of a very much anticipated “disavow tool” at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas yesterday, and posted a blog onto their Official Webmaster Central page. The disavow tool mainly helps site owners who have already received a link warning from Google regarding ‘unnatural links’ pointing to their site. Webmasters who genuinely think that their commercial site is harmed by low quality spam links from that of their competitors could now request Google not to take them into account. Webmasters can now submit their considerations to Google to get their spam links removed here.

Matt Cutts hinted on his plans to find a solution to disregard incoming external backlinks to a website, during the “You & A with Matt Cutts” keynote session held at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle.

Danny Sullivan: Now we hear a lot of people talking about “negative SEO.”

Matt Cutts: The story of this year has been more transparency, but we’re also trying to be better about enforcing our quality guidelines. People have asked questions about negative SEO for a long time. Our guidelines used to say it’s nearly impossible to do that, but there have been cases where that’s happened, so we changed the wording on that part of our guidelines. Some have suggested that Google could disavow links. Even though we put in a lot of protection against negative SEO, there’s been so much talk about that that we’re talking about being able to enable that, maybe in a month or two or three.

Primary beneficiaries

Those webmasters are aware of doing “negative SEO” in the past are the first cut beneficiaries of this disavow tool. Those who wish to correct their practices, take a U-turn from wearing a black hat to white hat, those who really wish to repent their action in the past, not really repent, kind-of repent. Despite the efforts you had taken to alert the sites that pass on the bad signal to your site, no change is found and your reputation still remains low, that’s the instinct you submit your spam link origin to Google’s disavow tool.

Matt recommends webmasters to use the “Links to Your Site” option in Webmaster Tools to spot links that could be hurting SERPs and try to sort out the problem internally before running to Google.

All you got to do once you enter the Google Webmaster Tools (a simple text file) – submit the links you wish to disavow one URL per line, and a domain as a whole by using domain:www.submitinme.com

Disavow tool for SEO

Take it serious says Matt Cutts

Once you disavow a link by mistake, you are caught, since it might take too long to get back that link back to your sight. That’s why Matt asks people who submit their claims to be very careful before jumping in. Matt warns that this tool is in the early stages and so it’s not advisable for most sites to submit their bad links now. He discourages commoners who are not very sure of technical stuffs from using this tool.

Matt adds, “If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have 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. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.”

- That’s really a serious warning by the creator.

And Matt Cutts stresses on “Don’t use this tool” throughout the video. I wonder why he just made it. May be he thought, “Bing, our second grade competitor has this facility and why don’t we have one, not being less than them?” OR Could he be tracking suspicious SEOs?

Definitely a Boon for the affected

Before taking an action Google will be doing an extensive check on whether the claim is valid or not and only then get into action. This could take a considerable amount of time, but should be really effective for the ones who crave for a good ranking. The tool prevents other webmasters from infecting your site, or would they dare to do such activities. Google takes all those claims submitted to its disavow tool very seriously, and with utmost concern. It’s for sure that we cannot assure that there will be no “negative SEO” if Matt Cutts ideologies on this disavow tool proves true. Bad practices will then take new forms and get even mightier than before.

Barry Schwartz writes in his live blog that at Pubcon, Danny Sullivan asked him a really tricky question for which Matt as usual never answered.

Danny: It is great you have the tool but sucks that you need the tool. Why do we have to worry about links that are hurting you? Why can't bad links not hurt your web site?

Matt: All the negative SEO complaints he sees, or most of it, is really not negative SEO hurting you. It is a much better use of your time to make your site better vs hurting someone else. At the same time, we've seen cases of this as an issue. I.e. buying a new domain and needing to clean up that site. There are people who want to go through this process. Plus SEOs that take on new clients that went through bad SEOs.

It would have been great if Matt had answered Danny’s question.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

Disavow tool, Negative SEO, SEO tool, New webmaster tool, Google webmaster tool update, Unnatural li

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author