Thread: Google Launches Disavow Link Tool

Here we go Google has launched a link disavow tool to clean-up your link profile.

The link disavow link tool is located here



Read more: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A new tool to disavow links

That disallow and the links to your site must be used a lot.
I just got another email from someone in the Uk wanting me to remove a link from 2 years ago in one of my blogs.
My standard reply is:
Sure, removal of any link on my blog has a fee of $10.00 per link.

Will see if the lady in the UK answers me back.

There is going to be a mad scramble to disavow links. It appears that Cutts is really concerned that they will be deluged. 700,000 unnatural links warnings went out to Webmaster Tools accounts. That only represents a small fraction of the sites hit by Penguin.

Hi,

Brew-ha-ha lol Disavow links, is Big G wanting people to come forward and say, Hi I tried to scam your system but I will be good from now on so my site gets listed again.

Sami

Originally Posted by Sami4u

Brew-ha-ha lol Disavow links, is Big G wanting people to come forward and say, Hi I tried to scam your system but I will be good from now on so my site gets listed again.


Sami

There's no guarantee that disavowing links will give you a Penguin recovery. It seems better to wait and let itself work out through attrition. Most low quality sites go off line on their own or the domains expire.

I can also see that a lot of the poor quality link sites are likely to go out of business as their business dries up. Link building companies may have to actually find quality sites to use for link building as more site owners become aware of the Penguin issues. Quality links. What a concept!

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I can also see that a lot of the poor quality link sites are likely to go out of business as their business dries up.

This is correct. But also I'm thinking about negative SEO. According to Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New notifications about inbound links Google may drop a sites ranking due to excessive article directory submissions or blog spam. You can't control who links to you and poor quality links can harm your site. So, this is probably the reason for the link disavow tool.

You can't control who links to you and poor quality links can harm your site.

I don't think that any inbound links can harm your site. The poor quality links just carry less weight. But the disavow tool can help G to improve their listings as the poor quality links (that cannot be removed by asking) will be ignored.

Originally Posted by Andy101

I don't think that any inbound links can harm your site. The poor quality links just carry less weight. But the disavow tool can help G to improve their listings as the poor quality links (that cannot be removed by asking) will be ignored.

That was the situation prior to Penguin, but Penguin changed that. Sites are now penalized for using too many poor quality links. Many of the Google articles about Penguin point out that artificial link building is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. That makes it an offense that can be penalized.

I have seen a few sites that did receive the warning messages. They were all penalized a few weeks later and before the site owners could fully react and correct the problem. From what I could determine, the penalties were selectively applied to keyword phrases that were used most often in hyperlink text in poor quality links. The penalties went beyond simply disregarding the links. In some cases, the sites were very strongly themed for the search phrases and probably would have ranked well without all of the crappy links.

One of my sites did experience a negative SEO attack about a year ago and prior to Penguin. That was back in a time when several other SEOs noticed that negative SEO attacks were working, which proved that links could destroy a site's rankings. I watched it happen so that I could observe the results. The site went from a PR3 to PR0 and lost all of its Google traffic (about 10k unique visitors per month) within 3 months. The attacker was using nonsensical phrases in the links. The links were coming from pages in a blog network that posted articles that shared the same theme as my site, but contained numerous nonsense text links to competitors and one legitimate link to the culprit's site. That proved to me that negative SEO does work.

So it seems like us small time netbuilders are defenseless against negative SEO attack unless we have a large number of natural links (even if they are not necessary to rank).