by samFor those of you who don’t know about or haven’t heard of the Google Disavow Tool; we at Digital Clicks thought we would give you a helping hand in knowing about it.
The Google Disavow Tool allows you to tell Google about potential incoming links which could affect your sites ranking, and disavow them. This means that Google will not take into account certain links that would be harmful when assessing your site.
However, Google will not disavow all of these links. They strongly recommend that you should remove as many spam or low quality links from your website as possible. We at Digital Clicks, as digital marketing consultants, recommend you do this to try and enhance your rankings. Then, once you can do no more, and you have done your best at removing the majority of those, that is when Google will disavow the rest.
Many SEO experts would get frustrated with the process of finding the questionable links to their sites and how Google would interpret the ranking of their sites based on these. But there is no need for this frustration any longer. Ralf Schwoebel spoke to Uli Lutz from Google about his concerns and was told that Google Webmaster was the tool to concentrate on as this can tell you which links are harming your sites ranking.
A few other useful updatesdiscussed included; not worrying about damaging other peoples site reputation and being aware of the disavow tool. This means that when disconnecting with potentially harmful links to your site, don’t worry about harming the reputation that Google thinks that site has, as it is not affected. Uli Lutz also suggested being aware of the Disavow Tool as it can be very helpful when not being able to disconnect with all harmful links, as the tool will make life easier for all of us.
How do we Disavow backlinks? It is a two-step process where you will need to download a list of links to your site and then create a file containing the links which you want to disavow, and upload this to Google.
Downloading your links is simple –
- On your Webmasters Tool homepage, click the site you want
- On the Dashboard, click Search Traffic, and then click Links to your site
- Under Who links the most, click More
- Click Download more sample links. If you click Download latest links you’ll see dates as well
You will have downloaded a file containing all the pages linking to your site now, so use this to create a text file (.txt) containing only the links you want to disavow, the ones Google will ignore.
Uploading your list –
- Go to the disavow links tool page
- Select your website
- Click Disavow links
- Click Choose file
This may take some time, but once it has uploaded you are done!