Google Disavow – A Powerful Tool To Cleanse Websites Of bad Links

SEO or search engine optimization is a very powerful tool with the help of which you can improve the rankings of your website. Of the many ways that help you achieve the same, adding links and backlinks is the best. But more often than not certain links get added to your website which might be considered as bad links by search engines like Google. In order to solve this problem of bad links and help you to remove them, Google has come up with very powerful bad link removal software known as the Google Disavow.

What is Google Disavow?

Getting caught up in link spam is very easy and there are many web mischief-makers who keep adding irrelevant and bad links to popular sites resulting in the website getting a warning message in the Webmasters Tool regarding these. In order to stop Google and other search engines from taking further action against your website in the future, you have to ensure that these spammy links are deleted from your webpage.

Doing this manually takes a lot of time and more often than not, some links tend to be left behind. This is where Google Disavow comes in the picture and allows you to inform Google about the links you want to disavow from your website.

What does Google consider as “unnatural links?”

Unnatural links are those which grossly violate the quality guidelines set down by Google. These links can be part of a paid link scheme or link exchange.

• A link scheme typically uses paid links to manipulate the amount of traffic received by a website thereby increasing its ranking process

• Link exchange deals with the group of websites who have an understanding among themselves to display links and banners of member websites so as to increase the popularity of all the concerned websites.

Buying and selling of links is a common way of increasing the popularity of websites but they violate the SEO quality guidelines set by Google and are hence considered to be illegal.

How to isolate these bad links?

The Webmaster tool has an option that gives information with regards to all the links that have been added to your site along with the date on which they were attached. This will help you not only to find out links which were not uploaded by you but also help you to make a list of the links you want to disavow.

How does Google Disavow work?

In order to take advantage of this powerful tool, you have to visit the new Disavow links page on Google and ask it to overlook these links when accessing your website.

This can be done in the following way

• Prepare a list of all the sites and domains you want to disavow and upload it onto the page preceded by a comment relevant to it.
• When making the file containing the list, the following points should be kept in mind

1. 1. Comments should be preceded by disavowing or deleting
   2. The full URL of the link to be blocked should be given
   3. Domain should be succeeded by the sub-domain to ensure the entire domain is blocked

•  The list prepared has to be uploaded as a file.
• This procedure comes to an end when you click on done in the dialog box.

Care must be taken while uploading the list since it can only be edited and reloaded till such time as you do not complete the process. Once you complete the whole process, the links will be disavowed, and thereafter any change you require is a long drawn process.