Understanding Google’s Disavow Tool and When to Use It

The Google disavow tool enables domain owners to alert Google about low-grade links pointing to their sites that they want to have disassociated from their domains. This allows Google to be notified by SEOs of what external links should be included in Google’s ranking factor assessments of a website.

Site publishers who bought links from a link farm or have multiple dangerous or spammy external links associated with their websites can benefit from using the Google disavow tool. Buying links violates Google’s policies and may result in the buyer’s website receiving penalties.

About the Google Disavow Tool

Since October 2012, digital marketers along with SEOs have had knowledge of the disavow tool from Google. Yet SEO and marketing experts claim that Google hides this tool, making it difficult to locate since most websites have no need for its use.

During 2012, Google’s Penguin update also altered the way in which Google deals with low-grade backlinks. If Google detects your site’s use of any black hat link-building methods, Penguin will penalise your website. However, the Google disavow tool can enable you to reinstate your site’s former ranking.

When to Use the Google Disavow Tool

Only make use of Google’s disavow tool if you are well-experienced in assessing a website. You need to have some degree of expertise in important aspects of site evaluation before using this tool. You also need to understand how to accurately identify links and other site content that may be harmful or spammy. If you make the wrong evaluation of an external link, you can cause harm to your backlink profile.

With the help of expert web developers and website content performance marketers, you can successfully identify bad links by performing a backlink hygiene analysis. This analysis can be achieved with the aid of a comprehensive backlink database providing optimal-value data concerning links. This high-calibre link database will enable you to locate backlink information relative to enterprise SEO pursuits.

If you have located poor-grade links that you want to disavow, the Google disavow tool is an excellent aid to use. Perhaps you have contacted link farms that you used in the past, requesting them to remove bad links. If these link farms have not responded to your request, you should consider notifying Google of your strong desire to have your site disassociated from these bad links.

You should be aware that you can use the Google disavow tool, and Google will then ignore these poor-grade links when performing an evaluation of your website. However, this will not remove the links from your site. These links will remain unless or until the link farm where you obtained them responds to your request for bad link removal.

Using the Google disavow tool can be compared to the process followed for cleaning up a consumer credit score. When working toward improving your score, you make contact with your creditors (or your third party websites) in an effort to settle accounts with them. You then make contact with the credit bureaus (or with Google) to remove items that have a negative effect on your credit score (or your Google PageRank).