Google Disavow Links Tool to Remove Unnatural Links
November 26, 2012
Sarvesh Bagla
Google recently released the Disavow Links Tool. The new Google Disavow Links Tool is aimed at helping you identify low quality back links. This tool can be used to request Google not to take these links into consideration when determining your PR (Page Rank) and keyword rankings.
The tool is important because irrelevant links and link spam (unnatural links) can harm your PR and keyword rankings. Low quality links that Google’s Disavow Link Tool will detect include paid links, reciprocal links, irrelevant links, comment spam, Web spam, automated links and links in low quality articles.
If you see a message on ‘unnatural links‘ in Webmasters Tools, the message is sent by Google to indicate a presence of link exchanges, paid links, and other link schemes that violate Google’s quality guidelines.
If you think you have done all you can to remove unnatural links and there are links that you still cannot remove, visit the Disavow Links page in Webmaster Tools. Once you are here, select your website, upload the file that has the link/s you intend to disavow, and format. Currently, one disavow file per website is allowed. You could search for bad links to disavow through ‘Links to Your Site’ features in Webmaster Tools.
Ever since Google started penalizing websites for poor quality back links, there was a fear that your competition could take advantage by building poor back links for your website to have it blacklisted and severely dent your business. The launch of this tool was imminent. More so, given that Bing launched a similar tool a few months ago.
Note that many websites will not need the new Google Disavow Links Tool if they don’t have any poor quality links. You should not use the tool if you do not know what it does. Sometimes it’s difficult to judge if a link violates Google’s quality guidelines. If you’re not sure, you could end up removing links that are actually helping your website. You should consider enlisting the services of an SEO company to help you disavow links. Note that it takes several weeks before the links you want to disavow are disavowed.
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