What is Google’s Disavow Tool?

6^th February, 2013

Have you been ever notified via Webmaster tools of manual spam action, based on ‘unnatural links’ coming to / from your website? This message is received when there is evidence of paid links, link exchanges or other link schemes that directly contravene Google’s quality guidelines.

Google’s Disavow tool is a means of remedying unnatural links coming from your site. It enables you to disavow links to your site, while addressing any issues at root level arising from unnatural links pointing to your website. By protecting your site’s appearance and keeping it free of spammy links, you ensure that all your users enjoy a good experience of your site.

Links give a sense of which web pages are relevant to users and are a great signifier in determining rankings. Being able to remedy link penalties and enable sites to recover their online visibility requires a clear understanding of exactly how Google’s Disavow Tool works.

Always bear in mind that if your link is not editorial then it effectively constitutes advertising. Google will not wish to count advertorial links. Indeed links which have been bought or obviously manipulated will not be helpful to you in any case.

Disavow can be a highly effective tool to use if your site has links with commercial anchor text. Writing a good reconsideration request and sending all relevant data demonstrates your own good will towards resolving the situation. It may be up to four weeks following penalties being revoked before any rankings come back to you, due in part to increasing numbers of reconsideration requests.

The most important tip is to keep refreshing your link data, keep your disavow file updated and to submit reconsideration requests accordingly…  Ok, there’s still a lot we don’t know, and Google is refining the tool and process as they go!

So, following two failed re-consideration requests (having not used the Disavow tool), we are now evaluating 6000+ links and compiling a Disavow report for a new Tidy Design client! Sadly this company is a victim of some blackhat SEO and dodgy link building, lets hope we can get SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) back on track soon… We will keep you posted on our progress.