How To Use Disavow Tool?
If we take a look at SEO factors, there is only one thing that seems to be constant. That is, the importance of backlinks. Google can use backlinks to determine if your site is useful and relevant.
This system has its flaws and not 100% perfect. Unreliable links can harm you, and anyone can link directly to you. To hurt your rankings, someone might send you bad links. Google is aware of this and has developed a tool that allows people to remove bad links. Let’s examine whether this is something you should use, the risks and the benefits, and some tips for how to use it.
Should We Need To Disavow Certain Links?
We would like to first say that most websites won’t need to remove links. Google is always working to filter out bad links, and this is why the Penguin 4.0 update was released in 2019.
Google has now ignored most of the negative links after this update. It’s not perfect, and you may still need to remove links from your site. It’s a good idea to review your link profile if you notice a significant traffic drop and have not received a manual action notification from google search console.
There may be a lot of unreliable links, but some could still be beneficial to you. We recommend that you remove all of them if you want to make the best long-term decisions. You will need to rebuild those links. It is important to understand the potential dangers of disavowing links in bulk.
Risks Factors Of Disavowing Links?
Good links are at greatest risk when you disavow them. It is possible to lose valuable traffic to your website and also damage your ranking. You should be cautious and remove links only if necessary, or if you are certain that the link is malicious or bad.
This could happen if you hire a scammy/spammy or amature SEO agency only to find out later. You should then look at the links they have built for your site and discredit/Remove or Disavow any or all of them. You should be concerned if you notice a rapid increase in the number of links to your site from people who have not done any particular action. However, you must be able analyze whether the links are from malicious websites or natural.
This can be difficult if your expertise is not there. If you’re not sure, you should consult a professional SEO team. They will be able to immediately spot any unnatural, malicious, or spammy link patterns. You can use multiple tools like Link Research Tools / Ahrefs / Majestic Seo to accomplish this task on your own.
You should be aware of manual actions. These are actions taken by Google’s human reviewers to punish a website for not following their guidelines. Although these are rare, but that can happen also.
There are many manual actions that can be taken, but not all of them can easily be resolved by disavowing the links. User-generated spam, thin content are two examples. If you are ever notified of an unnatural link, it is important to immediately review your link profile and remove it.
Benefits Of Using The Disavow Tool?
You can clean up your link profile with the disavow utility. This is useful if you’ve used poor tactics in the past, or were targeted by doing negative SEO by your competitors to downrank your website in search results.
You can also use the disavow tool to block specific websites from linking to your site. The disavow tool can be used to block all or any specific link coming from specific domains. Sites that link to certain content may not be desired by some people. For example, sites that contain adult content /forums or political sites they disagree with.
For Safety We Should Disavow Backlinks
You can also choose to remove links from a site proactively. Perhaps you’ve noticed links that aren’t going to help you, but you don’t know why. You can choose to Disavow the link from website even if it isn’t actively harming you. Google says this won’t give you significant results so we don’t recommend spending too much time there.
Which Type Of Links To Disavowed?
It is best to use a link analysis tool as mentioned above to identify the problematic links. Next, you can manually review the links by placing them on an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet. To get an idea of how many times a site links back to you, you will need to check all links carefully. You should remove links that are spammy, not useful, have expired or auto generated by tools services.
The next step is to think about why this website should link to your site. If you are unable to think of any reason why someone would link to your site, it is likely that they are malicious or spammy and you can Disavow them.
How To Create Disavow File
Once you have created a shortlist of links, it is time to create a disavow text file. It is easy to use the disavow tool. All you need to do is to input the links that you wish to be removed in a text document. To disavow a URL, simply enter the site’s URL along with the prefix in the file. Make sure you only put one link per line. To disavow domains, you simply need to type “domain:” followed by the domain without any space.
After this, you can check your disavow file to make any necessary amendments. Although we don’t know whether Google will consider these files once they have been submitted, it is possible to check your disavow file and make amendments accordingly. Submitting disavow file with good links can dangerously harm your website ranking in search results, in this case you should remove disavow file immediately to stop the impact.