What is Google Disavow Feature? How to create disavow file?
How to submit it to Google?
How to disavow incoming toxic links?
How to remove low-quality links?
When to do it?
How does it work? Do you have any danger for your website traffic?
Google’s Disavow is a feature that allows website owners to tell Google not to consider certain links that our website receives as backlinks because those are toxic or spammy links. So we need to disavow them.
It is called the Disavow Links Tool.
You can find this tool from the following URL, and you must log in to your Google search console before using it.
https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links
When to use Google Disavow Tool?
If you’re reading this post, this is the first time you’ve used this tool, so don’t.
Do not use the Disavow tool; you may lose all your traffic.
You will never need to use it in 99.9% of cases. It is not even if you believe your issue is among the 0.01%.
It is the last option after you have investigated all possible causes of a drop in visits and determined that the reason is a penalty for spam links and you have already attempted to eliminate them manually.
It may have directly affected Pagerank, so check it out.
What is Google’s policy on spam links?
Google gives little importance to low-quality links (junk or spammy) and detects them quickly.
Nowadays, google technology ignores low-quality spammy links, so we should not worry about it too much.
If there are hundreds to thousands of low-quality links for your website, then this will be a problem for Google and your website’s SEO.
Therefore it is always advised to review these low-quality spammy links within our Link Building strategy from time to time and file these links by talking to web admins if necessary.
How to check if you have spammy links pointing to your website?
The answer is Google Search Console.
You must go to Search Console > Links > With more links to your site > click on More > Download sample links.
From there, check for link farms, fake profiles, casino sites, adults, weapons, other languages, and other themes…
But beware! Having 12,726 links and not knowing where they come from does not mean they are wrong. Many will be from the same domain. No issues.
You should check if they are dofollow or nofollow links. See all types of links.
Can it happen to my website?
Anyone can suffer a negative SEO attack.
But you may also not have realized it, or someone has bought low-quality links for not knowing SEO.
They may appear after a blog or website theme change.
And if you have bought a domain, you should review the links before with Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, Xovi, and Google Search Console.
The Precautions
Avoid misusing Disavow. Google targets you. Only do it if an attack affects sales, results, and visits. Or to prevent a serious attack.
Google says: Check the www and non-www versions of your domain in Search Console when viewing links to your site. Look at their data—Google considers their different websites.
How to Use the Disavow Tool for Links Disavow?
Once you have found the “bad” links with Google Search Console or another SEO tool like Moz SPAM SCORE Checker, you must create the disavow-domain-com.txt file (it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII) with notepad (or Notepad++) with one exact URL per line.
https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links
Instead of all URLs from that domain, use domain:example.com for each line as well to disavow the domain.
You can use lines to separate with comments like # Casino websites.
Do not add anything else, or the file will not work, and note that there is a limit of 100,000 URLs and 2MB for each disavow file.
Then you must choose the domain from the list and upload the created file.
You can then delete the file. Once uploaded, this file can take at least 2 – 3 months until Google takes the links into account again, and it can mean a significant loss of ranking positions if it has done wrong.
If you want to make any changes to the list of links, you must download and update it since Google will only consider this file.
Google says the following about link removal: If you believe that low-quality links we do not control harm your website’s ranking, you can ask Google not to consider them when evaluating your site. Nonetheless, do everything possible to remove erroneous links pointing to your pages. Remember that simply prohibiting them is insufficient.
Conclusion:
As I said before, if you are reading this, you should not use the Disavow tool, and you have another problem.
If you continue to use it, you should be aware that these links will be displayed in the inbound links section of Google Search Console.
Matt Cutts mentions the Disavow tool:
You should also be aware that deauthorizing a domain is said to affect any subdomains.
And don’t use this tool for internal links! That is what your website’s link structure (menu, internal links, noindex, robots.txt…) is for, as I discuss in my SEO course.
Have you suffered any Negative SEO attacks in the recent google core updates? How did you fount it, and how did you solve it? Have you used the Google Disavow tool?
Find more information on Google’s John Mueller Question and answer here.
Please comment here.