Google’s New Disavow Tool: Should You Use It?
The short answer is, probably not. For more, read on…
What is Google’s Disavow Tool?
The Disavow tool is a way for you to instruct Google to ignore unnatural (spammy) links that are hurting your site’s Google search rankings.
What could make you a candidate for using this tool?
- If you have received a bad link warning from Google.
- If you know your site has been penalized for links.
- Google denied your request to reconsider a penalty to your site.
- You are sure that your site has been hit by Penguin, which targets aggressive and low quality linking strategies. (For more on Penguin, contact us at Zephoria and we’ll fill you in on it.)
- Your site’s search rank is suffering due to a negative SEO link-based attack from a competitor.
What are the drawbacks to using it?
- There is no data yet about the tool’s effectiveness.
- It can be difficult to determine which links are bad and how bad they are; you could do more harm than good if you overuse it.
- If your site has not been penalized, it might not be a good idea to draw Google’s attention to potentially problematic issues.
- Google recommends using this tool only after you have already tried removing questionable links.
- We agree.
How Can Zephoria Help?
We can do a thoughtful analysis of your link profile and let you know if we see any problems. Then we can guide you in the best way to solve any issues. In most cases, we will be able to help you eliminate links that are detrimental to your search rankings without risking any downside from involving Google directly. And if we do think your situation could benefit from use of the Disavow tool, we’ll let you know and go from there.
The Deep Dive: Read the full article from SEOMoz