Why You Need To Know About Disavow
In the beginning days of search engine optimization, the focus of a website was on the amount of backlinks a website had, what specific keywords were being used, and how popular those keywords and linked sites happened to be. If you could generate thousands of links, then chances were good that you’d have a great ranking on your selected keywords for your website. In 2013, times have changed when it comes to backlinks and if you’ve got bad, spammy, or even paid backlinks to your site, you could end up with a lower rank or even be taken out of the index. Because of that, Google introduced the disavow tool.
Work Hard To Remove Bad Links First
Before utilizing the disavow tool, it is important to work at asking other webmasters to remove backlinks that could be hurting you. That might mean taking your website out of link farms, to stop paying for specific backlinks from various blogs, directory links, or articles that are from spintax. Segregate the links that you’re concerned about and take them on, one by one. The Google disavow tool will only specifically disavow links that are shown to be problematic for you, so make your case that they’re problematic by doing the research first and attempt to get rid of them yourself first. Those who have shown an effort at removing these problem backlinks first are often given precedence on their requests.
Make a List of What Links Are Problematic
Give yourself at least a couple weeks to work on this project. If you aren’t getting responses back from certain sites, then add them to the list of links that are problematic. You will also want to run a list of the amount of live links that you have to see if new problematic links have cropped up during your efforts. Then create a .txt file of each problematic link, one per line, to submit for the disavow tool. Make sure you also add comments about what efforts you’ve taken to remove these links yourself in the .txt file and start those comment lines with a “#” symbol as those line are ignored by the tool, but are read.
Don’t Be Afraid To Disavow an Entire Domain If Necessary
If you’ve got a lot of links from the same domain that fall into the negative category, you can quickly remove or reduce a penalty imposed on you from those links by simply disavowing the entire domain. Instead of requesting specific links through the disavow tool, request that the entire domain be disavowed. Though this may dramatically reduce the amount of backlinks you have, remember that you’re looking for quality links now instead of a massive quantity of links.
It’s Important To Work On This Today
Even if you haven’t had a penalty assessed to your domain yet, the time is now to go through your links to make sure that they are of good quality. You don’t always have the ability to control who links to your site, but you do need to be proactive in contacting bad domains that could have a negative influence on your rankings to make sure no penalties are introduced. If you don’t have any luck getting these links taken down, then remember Google’s disavow and you’ll have the quality site with a good ranking you’ve always had.
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