After months and months of waiting, Google has finally released their new link disavow tool. Matt Cutts at Pubcon in Las Vegas announced this as a new tool in Webmaster Tools in order to help “remove” low quality links pointing to your website that you do not control.
Texas SEO states this is a game changer for the good. SEO can be a tricky practice, but with the right tools and knowledge you too can climb the rankings in the Search Engines.
You can view Matt Cutt’s interview on the new Link Disavow Tool Here:
If you were to log into GWT (Google Webmaster Tools), within the tool itself Google says the following: “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 accessing your site.”
Thought Google supplies a tool for removal of links, it is best to remove your low-quality links from the web all together. If you do try and remove these web links from the internet yourself, it is very time consuming and takes a lot of work. You’ll need to make that decision based on how much resources and effort you can put into removing the bad links.
Google does give some advice to follow. One being, not to disavow links from your own website. It is best to first remove the links from the web, hence you have full control over the links on your website so remove them yourself.
Google also states the tool consists of a text file or a .txt file titled disavow.txt. Within this text file you can insert one URL per link that tells Google to ignore the site.
You can also use it to block a whole domain by using a format like: domain:www.example.com. It may take weeks for Google to actually disavow links, so keep that in mind when submitting your information.
Google states that users will be able to download the files they submitted, and re-submit them again at a later date with any changes they might have made.
This is great for keeping up with the latest Google algorithm changes. Though Matt Cutts does state the tool is like using the “no follow” rule. What is the “no follow” rule? No follow rule is a little piece of coding you can put inside a hyperlink ( “rel=”nofollow” ) that tells Google that you want to link to a given website but you do not want to pass any PageRank.
Page Rank. What is it and why do I need to know about it?
PageRank is Google’s number ranking system to show the world how they judge a page based on the incoming links from other sites, as well as incoming links from other pages on your website.
If you’d like to look at it another way a link is basically a “vote” for your website and the quality that is associated with it. Though PageRank is an important signal to Google, it is only 1 of well over 200 signals Google will be looking for when ranking your website.
Read below to see what Google has put out in regards to their new tool. A Google webmaster trends analysis by the name of Jonathan Simon wrote:
If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines.
If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible. This is the best approach because it addresses the problem at the root.
By removing the bad links directly, you’re helping to prevent Google (and other search engines) from taking action again in the future. You’re also helping to protect your site’s image, since people will no longer find spammy links pointing to your site on the web and jump to conclusions about your website or business.
Use this tool with caution, Google has stated previously that if you use link disavow tool incorrectly, this new feature can harm your entire website’s performance in the Google search results. We don’t want that to happen. You might want to use link disavow tool only if you are having issues, are sandboxed, or have been penalized by Google for certain keywords, at least until the tool continues to develop.
There are numerous great tips on how to use Google’s new link disavow tool over the internet, have a look on this article on searchenginewatch.com.
You can have one disavow file per site, and that file will be shared among site owners within the Webmaster Tools account, so keep that in mind. Your maximum size limit you can have is 2MB.
Texas SEO team and Henry H. Hernandez has been teamed together since the company’s inception. Henry H. Hernandez has been in the SEO business for over 10 years, and loves to write, share, blog, and speak regarding his knowledge and experience throughout his SEO years. Henry and Texas SEO is currently writing an SEO beginners study called “SEO: Why SEO is Right For Any Business”. Their website is located at http://www.texaseo.com/
Navin
Hi I'm Navin owner of TechInfo Blog. I usually write about WordPress, SEO and Technology updates on this blog. Connect me: Twitter @navinshettyy Google Plus: Circle me.
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Hi Navin,
Yes, Google has recently launched this new tool as Link Disavow tool in order to help combat link spam. I like this tool is really and would be a great help too. Thanks for the share!!
Indeed Link Disavow tool is a most useful tool to avoid linkspam. Thanks for your visit and comment Aditi.
Hi Navin,
Amazing and useful news, well i think google has finally proved that their is an importance for quality blogs. So first of all i would like to say that its an awesome tool from which we can easily remove the spam links which are pointing to our blog.
Sometimes our blog may get backlinks from the spam link, which are usually created by spammer. So in that position we can remove it easily by using this tool.
thanks