Google Releases Disavow Tool... Use with Caution

by Andy Carroll, 21 Oct 2012

The last year or two has seen a flurry of website owners cleaning up their link profile to avoid receiving penalties from Google. This started with the "Panda" and "Penguin" algorithm updates. To those well behaved website owners these cute and cuddly names might have meant great leaps up the search pages... to the others they represent little monsters creating mayhem.

If your search marketing efforts have involved aggressive link building tactics you will likely be aware of the impact of recent developments. If you have employed search engine "specialists" in the past and recently seen drops in search performance you will need to pay close attention.

Google's webmaster guidelines are intended to ensure you avoid manipulating there search results pages. Failing to follow the guidelines could mean your site loses rank performance or even removal from search results. If you find your website has links from dubious sources you will need to review them and decide if they need to be removed.

Google has now released a tool "Google Disavow Tool" to highlight those links to your website that you would prefer not to be associated with. Essentially it is a file you update with a list of links from other websites to yours. If you already have a free Google Webmaster account the tool is available there or you can register and verify as the site owner to investigate links and decide if you need to take any further action.

Caution: Inbound links are an important part of your site's performance in the search results. You need to be completely sure the links you highlight or remove are against Google's Guidelines and in no way helping your current search performance.

Here Matt Cutts from Google's web spam team covers the new tool

Further Information Regarding Search Performance

If you are not already aware, Google has been clamping down on websites that attempt to manipulate their search algorithm. Their search algorithm is the logic process they use to determine the position of a website in the search results page. It uses a combination of factors to determine an overall score for relevancy of a particular page and "authority" or trust that the page and publisher is accurate and deserving of a high position for a given keyword typed into the search box.

The "relevancy" is based on the text that the website and its pages contain whilst the "authority" is based on the number of links and social signals found around other places on the internet. As an example a Wikipedia page about "Ford Mustang" will likely have lots of relevant text but it will also be seen as a trusted source with lots of other websites linking to the page as a good source of information.

Search engine optimisation professionals know this and focus time and effort "building" these all important links. Unfortunately this can often be seen as manipulating an otherwise natural "Authority" process. For example some SEOs buy links from other websites, swap links with other webmasters or create networks of low quality websites which they seed with links in volume with just a few clicks of a button.

In the distant past search engine optimisation professionals manipulated "relevancy" by misleading search engines. For example they would use tactics like filling a web page selling "medicine" or "loans" with huge volumes of text about "Ford Mustangs". The text was seen by the search engine but hidden to the visitor who would discover his search for "Ford Mustang" had led him to the wrong place. Search engines have now become very wise to these techniques and have effectively removed much of this kind of "SPAM" from search results.

More recently the focus has been on enforcing more natural links, websites know to be using paid links or links networks have seen there website drop down many pages in the search results or even a complete removal for the worst offenders. This usually means the end for a website though Google offers a last chance for reconsideration in its web master tools system.

If you would like help reviewing you site links, give me a call.

Google Releases Disavow Tool... Use with Caution

Here Matt Cutts from Google's web spam team covers the new tool

Further Information Regarding Search Performance

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Andy Carroll