Disavow is a tool provided by Google that allows website owners to request the exclusion of specific backlinks from influencing their site’s rankings.
Disavow Links – Meaning
In SEO, disavowing links refers to removing links that point to your site that are harmful.
If low-quality links from sources outside your control hurt your site’s ranking. You can disavow your backlinks to Google so that they don’t count towards your rankings.
What is the Purpose of Disavowing Backlinks?
This tool’s sole purpose is to stop Google from considering harmful links. This may be done for three reasons.
If You Receive a Manual Penalty for Your Site, You Should Use the Disavow Tool
The “manual punishments” have become a scourge in an Internet dominated by Google. The Disavow Tool must be used in cases of manual penalties. Penalties administered manually formed the basis of the creation of Google’s Disavow Tool by Google.
If You Receive an Algorithmic Penalty, Use the Disavow Tool
Even though algorithmic penalties aren’t as terrible as manual penalties, they can still take a website down. A toxic backlink may have caused your traffic drop because of an algorithm change. By disavowing this link, you can regain your traffic.
Your Link Profile Can Be Cleaned by Utilizing the Disavow Tool
Having a high Spam Score means your links are toxic backlinks.
In order to calculate Spam Score, you need to know what kind of links are on the website.
Disavowing a backlink is a good option if the Spam Score exceeds 2.
How Do I Disavow a URL or Link
A website owner who has a Google Analytics tracking tag installed on their site gains access to Google Search Console tools, which provide data about a website’s link structure.
On Search Console’s Link Report page, you can perform a link audit. Simply click on the huge “Export External Links” icon in the upper right corner and then select “More Sample Links”. Select the file type you want to export.
In any case, if you’re writing it yourself, there are certain guidelines that must be followed, but they are quite straightforward:
- There should be a separate line for each entry
- It is necessary to start each entry with “domain:” (minus the quotation marks)
- The name of the file is not important.
A typical list may include the following entries if you adhere to these rules:
- domain:xyz.com
- domain:xyz12.com
- domain:blackhatservices.com/xyz–ed
Rather than listing each URL individually, you can blacklist the entire domain. Furthermore, there are relatively few situations where it is appropriate to remove one link while permitting others.
When you visit the Google Disavow Tool, you’ll see a series of warnings, after which you’ll be given the option to browse your local folders and choose a file to upload. Click through all of the warnings until you reach the dialogue box.
Make sure the correct property is selected if you have multiple accounts.
Then, click on the disavow document created earlier, then click “Open” under the disavow button.
In the next few days, Google will stop evaluating your pages’ ranking based on the listed domains.
Using the Google Disavow Tool is as simple as following these steps:
- Step 1: Identity the links to be disavowed.
- Step 2: Prepare your disavow list. Arrange it by domain or URL.
- Step 3: Publish your disavow list by uploading a .txt file to the Google Disavow Tool.
When Should I Disavow Backlinks
Link types are understood extremely well by Google. Therefore, you don’t need to identify the bad links right away unless you have been seriously affected by a lot of spam.
Instead of performing this task every three to six months, disavowing links is recommended to be done as a reactive measure. Moreover, it is possible to be penalized if you mistakenly renounced quality links that did not create any problems for your search engine optimization.
So, if you are uncertain about the need to disavow backlinks, the most effective thing to do would be to look at your Google Search Console.
Is your site getting a notification from Google alerting you to inappropriate links coming to it? In that case, you should disavow the website in question.
When you receive a Google Search Console manual action message such as the one below, disavowing links might be a good idea for you.
As a result, disavowing links should only be done as an extreme last resort and should not be used on a regular basis.
Therefore, having a conversation with the website owner is a good idea before you use this tool. It is usually on their website that you can find the contact information.
Afterward, get in touch with the website and ask them to take down the link.
Disavow These Four Types of Links
- Comments and forums with spam links
It is not a good idea to link to blogs and forums solely to build backlinks. It would be wise to include any irrelevant links you receive from comments in your disavow file.
- Schemes of linking
Private blog networks (PBNs) consist of a large number of blogs and sites owned by the same person so as to establish links among them in order to make it easier for the content to rank on Google.
This type of link scheme is considered by many to be no longer acceptable white hat SEO practices. The process of de-indexing them was initiated by Google in 2014. Avoid potential penalties by disavowing such links.
- Viruses on websites
An outgoing link or a3 compromised site needs to be disavowed in large numbers of links. In addition, this may mean your web page is under attack by a negative search engine optimization campaign.
In addition to disavowing the links, monitor the activity under the Manual Actions section on Search Console in case there is a problem in the future.
- Domains that have expired
When a website has dead links, it’s useless to have links from it. In addition to penalizing people for expired domain links, Google has webmaster quality guidelines that see expired domain links as a violation.
What Happens when you Disavow Backlinks
A Risk-benefit Analysis
One of the risks of using the Disavow Tool is that it is impossible to tell which links are damaging more than they benefit – if any at all.
A disavow file also makes it more likely that you are engaging in unethical link-building techniques that will hurt you on your next project if you do engage in such activity.
Disavow should be used sparingly and with caution, in my opinion. A disavow may put your mind at ease more than not disavowing links that you are confident are doing you no good.
Summing it up
Google Search Console should always be monitored for backlinks.
Consider other metrics if your Spam Score is over 5,
I hope you now understand what disavow means.
Moreover, if you have any additional SEO FAQs or if we have missed anything in this post – let us know.
