Many people are saying that they don’t have controls over links pointing to their website from bad neighborhoods sites or unwanted sites. Instances of Google penalizing sites based on these unnatural links are increasing and thus the fear of these types of negative SEO is also increasing.

Read on this blog of mine on how to deal with the negative SEO against your website.

Last year when Google updated many updates of Penguin and Panda, I realized that links made by SEO executives during past will definitely create problem for their clients in future. And this situation came too early.

Many websites get this manual action of unnatural links to your site on their webmaster tools account. It was an alarming situation for them.

What Next

The panic started to build in the group of webmasters. Obviously they were aware that Google is not going to give importance to their website in their search results, unless and until they are going to clean this situation.

Here comes a new earning concept by some website owners who were running some poor quality sites, like directory sites, social bookmarking sites, copied content blogs, etc. They now started displaying a special page on their website or a new section in which they claims that we normally charge this much of amount for removing links.

I am not sure how many of site owners paid them for removing their links from their site, but yes they might think that many people will pay them for this.

On the other hand this situation gave another opportunity to these so called SEO executives whose business was running on those cheap and poor techniques only, and with Google’s strictness, their bread and butter was in danger. They started a new way to earn, and this was to make links to some popular websites on these types of poor quality websites, which will harm the ranking of those popular sites.

They thought this way these popular sites will fear from them and pay to them.

Let me give you an example, one of my friends, who was running a travel website, got a call from a so called SEO executive, who gave threats to him that he is going to destroy the hard earned ranking of your website by creating poor quality links for your website, unless you agrees to pay him a handsome amount, that too on a monthly basis.

What a shame…

And to your surprise my friend was not the only one who is getting these types of threatening call.

What need to do?

If you too are facing similar kind of situation, or your website is also getting penalized by Google (read 20 reasons which might penalize your website by Google), the first thing which you can do is take a long breathe, and relax. Don’t panic, and allow the bad person to benefit from the situation which you are facing.

How to Deal with Negative SEO!

The best way to do so is you need to monitor the back links which your website is getting, either by you or by any SEO company authorized by you, or by any unauthorized sources. Any links which seems bad to you, neglect them easily with the help of the Google Disavow tool.

You might also want to read this blog of mine on Google Disavow Links Tool.

How to Disavow a Link

The reason why many website owners are panicking is simply because many of them are not yet aware about disavow links tool, while on the other hand there are still a huge number of website owners who are not at all familiar about how to do so.

Well, to be very precise, I was also not that much aware about how does the Google disavow links tool work; until I filed the same for a client of mine a few days back. This was the only reason why I did not blogged on this topic a few days back only.

How does the Google Disavow Links Tool work?

How to Use Disavow Links Tool?

Don’t worry; it’s not a big deal. The first thing which you need to do is to download the links to your website.

How to Download Links to your Website:

Simple, visit the webmaster tools account of your website and then travel to the Search Traffic -> Links to Your Site section, and check the section of Who Links the Most to your site and click on More.

You will get an option of downloading the table, or downloading more sample links or downloading latest links option. When you chose the last option of download latest links one, you will get the data with dates as well.

*Tip: If you are seeing both the www and non-www version of your site in your webmaster tools account then you need to download latest links from both the section. It will give you more options and variations.

Create a Disavow Text File:

The next step is to contact each and every website owners whose sites are linking to your website to remove your link. Though I know it’s a tedious and lengthy process, but it will return some good results as well. I myself got around 25% of links removed for one of my client on basis of this contact only.

Once this contacting the site owner’s process will be over, you then need to create a text file with the list of sites and individual pages that you want to disavow.

In this file you can either choose an individual page/post from a domain or all the links from a particular domain to disavow. You can put one link per line basis.

If you want to disavow all the links from a particular domain then write domain:sitename.extension and it will disavow all the links pointing to your website from this sitename.extension.

*Tip: Always remember that if a domain is disavowed then you won’t even get the benefits of a link given by them to your site in future as well.

*Tip: If you want to disavow a particular page/post from a site, you need to give the complete URL of the page with http:// It will disavow that particular URL for your website.

You can also place comments in your disavow file, it will begin with # sign. Like you might write:

#Sites contacted on this date, but got no response:

Remember Google will ignore the lines which will begin with #.

How to submit the file for Disavow:

Well to do so you need to visit this link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main its direct link is not yet there on the webmaster tools.

Here you can select the website for which you wanted to submit this disavow file. Clicks disavow links and choose the text file.

*Tip: Always remember that Google will keep only one and the latest file for its disavowing purpose. All other or previous files will be replaced with the new one only.

You are done with the disavow process, but don’t expect a quick results from it.

Once you submitted this process, you can again file a reconsideration request to Google. So you just need not to worry about any extortion calls which you might receive from so called SEO executives. Let them create as many links as possible, they will only waste their own time, you just need to monitor all the links to your website in your webmaster tools account for any unnatural links to your website.

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