Google Launches Disavow Links Tool!

It was February 23, 2011 when Google first launched the famous Panda update, which was a major update, and affected around 12% search results that time. Panda update was something which was related with types of bad content, duplicate content, content farms, etc. Basically the update was an effort by Google to provide the quality results to its users.

Since then, Google rolled out different versions of Panda, Penguin, and many smaller updates like Freshness Update, EMD (Exact Matched Domain) update, etc. All these updates give the goose bump in the stomach of many so called search engine optimizers and professionals.

Honestly, those who were involved with any kind of unethical stuff, while promoting their websites, are sure to get these goose bumps. But the guys like me who always tried to do all the ethical stuff, and develop the website as per the need of their visitors, will never face any problem with these updates. You might consider that I am doing a bit of self praising, it’s true up to an extent too, but frankly, it’s a fact.

Anyways, let’s leave behind this discussion. Let’s get back to our current discussion which is that, Google launches one of the most anticipated link tool, known as Disavow Link Tool. Matt Cutts, who is the head of the Web Spam team of Google, revealed this.

Frankly speaking, at around the end of the June 2012, Bing launched their Disavow link tool, which already created pressure on Google to release it as soon as possible.

What is Disavowing Links?

Well, frankly speaking it is a process in which you can request the search engines to not count or consider the particular back link of your own website. Consider the nofollow attribute, disavow is also similar as far as the concept is concerned. Through rel=”nofollow” tag we requests search engines not to crawl a particular link which we were placing on our own website, while with disavow tool we would request search engines not to consider a particular link which someone else placed on his/her website.

How it Works?

As per Matt, Google is becoming better at accessing the back links of a website, and as we all know the importance which back links plays in ranking of the website, some people will think to remove the low quality back links, or some kind of paid links, which Google can consider bad, or any link from unrelated neighborhoods. Frankly, it’s useful as far as if your site is in anyway involved with link trading, which Google does not at all like.

So the process of disavowing links is quite simple, you can create a text file, which can include comments in the form of the lines starting with a pond sign i.e. #, or one links at one line like example1.com/page1.html, or directly you can exclude all the links from a particular domain which will have the syntax like domain:sitename.com

An example of the sample text file can be like this:

# here is a comment which can explain about the dates when we contacted the site owners
http://www.example1.com/page1.html
domain:example2.com

Thus the above example can explain you clearly about how to create a sample text file which can be submitted to Google for considering disavowing the links.

How much Time will it take to Disavow?

Well, as per Matt Cutts it can take around a few weeks to disavow links. He also warned to use this tool very carefully as you can think about considering the links again, but for Google it will be hard to consider the same link once it is disavowed earlier.

One more thing, as per Matt, it is a simple request, and depends on Google whether they want to consider it or not. Though as per him, it is a request with highest priority.

Though he also suggested to first directly contacting the respective site owners to remove the links rather than directly asking Google to disavow the link.

Who Should Use it?

Well million dollar question is that who should use the disavow link tool? Well, basically this tool is good for those webmasters whose website got affected with Google Penguin update, or those who participated in any kind of link trading or link spamming.

As per Matt, most people actually do not need to use this tool. More precisely, if you are really not doing any excessive or aggressive SEO, and you are truly following the normal sort of things as per the Google webmaster guidelines, then you are not suppose to use this link tool.

You can also watch the video in which Matt Cutts explained all these things:

That is the all about the Disavowing the links for the moment, while I was excited to let you all know about a particular thing. A few days back, Allison Boyer who is a writer for BWE’s blog and the owner of Blog Zombies, liked my recent blog on Google Adwords Tips for Beginners, and put it into her series of Brilliant Bloggers. It was truly a great moment for me, if you want you can also check the post on 28 Brilliant Bloggers Talk About Adwords.

Do not forget to share your own opinion about the Google Disavow link tool, as well as my achievement of featuring in the brilliant bloggers list. I will be waiting for your comments.