Matt Cutts Finally Announces Link Disavow Tool For Google Webmaster Tools

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After months of anticipation, Google’s Matt Cutts, at PubCon in Las Vegas today, finally announced a new tool in Webmaster Tools to disavow links.
Cutts made comments at SMX Advanced back in July, indicating that a tool would be on the way, and it is now here.
In text on the tool itself, Google says, “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.”
Here is Cutts talking about it in a new Webmaster Help video:

“You might have been doing blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, guestbook spam…maybe you paid somebody to write some low quality articles and syndicate those all over the place with some very keyword rich anchor text, and maybe Google sent you a message that says, ‘We’ve seen unnatural links to your site or we’ve taken targeted action on some of the unnatural links to your site,’ and so as a result, you want to clean up those backlinks,” Cutts says in the video.
First and foremost, he says, they recommend getting those links actually removed from the web. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Google says in a help center article:
PageRank is Google’s opinion of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other sites. (PageRank is an important signal, but it’s one of more than 200 that we use to determine relevancy.) In general, a link from a site is regarded as a vote for the quality of your site.
Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or a search engine optimizer (SEO) you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.
If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.
Update: Google has now put out an official blog post about the tool. In that, Webmaster Trends Analyst Jonathan Simon writes:
If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible. This is the best approach because it addresses the problem at the root. By removing the bad links directly, you’re helping to prevent Google (and other search engines) from taking action again in the future. You’re also helping to protect your site’s image, since people will no longer find spammy links pointing to your site on the web and jump to conclusions about your website or business.
If you’ve done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, and there are still some links you just can’t seem to get down, that’s a good time to visit our new Disavow links page. When you arrive, you’ll first select your site.
According to a liveblogged account of Cutts’ speech, he says not to use the tool unless you’re sure you need to use it. He mentioned that Google, going forward, will be sending out more messages about examples of links Google is distrusting. He also says not to disavow links from your own site.
Regarding those link messages, Cutts says in the video that these are only examples of links, and not a comprehensive list.
The tool consists of a .txt file (disavow.txt), with one URL per line that tells Google to ignore the site. You can also use it to block a whole domain by using a format like: domain:www.example.com.
Cutts apparently suggests that most sites not use the tool, and that it is still in the early stages. Given that link juice is a significant ranking signal for Google it’s easy to see why Google wouldn’t want the tool to be over-used.
It can reportedly take weeks for Google to actually disavow links. In a Q/A session, according to the liveblog from Search Engine Roundtable, Cutts said you should wait 2-3 days before sending a reconsideration request after you submit a disavow file. When asked if it hurts your site when someone disavows links from it, he reportedly said that it typically does not, as they look at your site as a whole.
Danny Sullivan blogs that “Google reserves the right not to use the submissions if it feels there’s a reason not to trust them.”
Users will be able to download the files they submitted, and submit it again later with any changes. According to Sullivan’s account, Cutts said the tool is like using the “nofollow” attribute in that it allows sites to link to others without passing PageRank.
That’s good to know.
A lot of SEOs have been waiting for Google to launch something like this for a long time. Perhaps it will cut down on all of the trouble webmasters have been going through trying to get other sites to remove links. At the same time, we also have to wonder how much overreaction there will be from webmasters who end up telling Google to ignore too many links, and shooting themselves in the foot. This will be a different era, to say the least.
Just be warned. Google’s official word of caution is: ” If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.”
The information Google uses from the tool will be incorporated into its index as it recrawls the web and reprocesses the pages it sees.
Google currently supports one disavow file per site. That file is shared among site owners in Webmaster Tools. The file size limit is 2MB.

Google Launches New Page Layout Update (Yes, ANOTHER Update)

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Google is on a roll with these updates. I think webmasters are starting to understand what Google’s Matt Cutts meant when he said a while back that updates would start getting “jarring and jolting”. It seems, that rather than one major update, we’re getting a bunch of updates in a short amount of time. This past Friday, Google launched its latest Penguin refresh. A week before that, it was the EMD update and a new Panda update.
Tuesday, Cutts tweeted about a Page Layout update:


The Page Layout update was first announced early this year, months before we ever saw the first Penguin update. It’s sometimes referred to as the “above the fold” update. It was designed to target pages that lack content above the fold. At the time, Cutts wrote in a blog post:
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.
We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.
It looks like Christmas has come early for webmasters this year. Although, on that note, this could be a sign that Google is getting all of this stuff out of the way before the holiday season, so they don’t mess too much with your rankings during this crucial time of year for ecommerce. They’ve shown in the past that they’ve learned from the infamous Florida update.

Google Penguin Update Gets A New Data Refresh

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Oh that Google and their late Saturday 6th Oct announcements. Sometimes it’s the big monthly (at least they used to be) “search quality highlights” lists, but they were kind enough to release that on Thursday this past week. Still, Google’s Matt Cutts managed to sneak in a Penguin announcement on Friday. He tweeted:


He followed that up with:



Cutts has made comments in the past indicating that this update could be “jarring”. Are you seeing the effects? It’s been quite a week for Google updates. The Friday before this announcement, Cutts announced the EMD update, and later noted that there was also a Panda update rolling out. More on all of this here. I’m sure we’ll be discussing the Penguin update more in the coming week.

Google: By The Way, A Panda Update Is Rolling Out Alongside The EMD Update

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Last Friday, Google announced the EMD update. It was billed as a small and minor update, but the effects seemed to be fairly large, with many webmasters claiming to have been hit. Google’s Matt Cutts made it a point to say that the algorithm change was unrelated to both Panda and Penguin.
He then said it was not the only update that was rolling out during that timeframe, noting that Google makes changes every day (over 500 a year). He didn’t happen to mention that there was a new Panda update, however. Finally, he has dropped the news that there was indeed a Panda update going on at the same time as the EMD update (and it’s still rolling out).
Were you impacted by one of these updates? Are you able to discern which one it was? Let us know in the comments.
Search Engine Land reports that Google released a Panda algorithm update (not a data refresh, but an actual update) on Thursday, and that it impacts 2.4% of English search queries (and is still rolling out). That’s significantly larger than the 0.6% of English-US queries Cutts said the EMD update affected. So, it seems that the majority of those claiming to be hit by the EMD update were likely hit by Panda (which would explain those claiming to be hit, that didn’t have exact match domains).
Here’s the exact statement from Cutts that the publication is sharing: “Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 9/27. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday 9/27, but the full rollout is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example).”
Couldn’t he have just said that in the first place? Google had to know the confusion this would cause. Since the original Panda update, Google has made more of an effort to be transparent about algorithm changes, and it certainly has been. It seems, however, like delayed transparency is becoming the trend recently.
For months, Google was releasing monthly lists of updates that had been made the prior month. The last time, they left people waiting before finally posting a giant list for two months’ worth of changes. It seems that Google is doing this again, as we have yet to see lists for August or September (assuming Google is about to release these lists).
Either way, it appears the Panda continues to wreak havoc on webmasters. Wait until they get a load of the next Penguin.
For those sites that were hit, obviously if there is not an exact match domain involved, that makes the problem a little easier to figure out, at least in terms of which update the site was actually hit by. It seems unlikely that the EMD update would have done much to impact you if your site does not use an EMD. Which leaves Panda (and of course, any other updates that Google hasn’t told us about – they do make changes every day, and often more than one in a day).
While Cutts said that the EMD update is unrelated to Panda, that is not necessarily the case, depending on how you view the comment. Algorithmically speaking, I presume Cutts means the two have nothing to do with each other. However, in concept, the two are very similar in that they go after low quality. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that if you improve the quality of your content, you could actually recover from either update? That is assuming that the EMD update is one that can be recovered from. Let’s put it this way: if it’s possible to recover from the EMD update (which most likely it probably is), improving the quality of your site and content should be the main objective.
This just happens to be the same objective for recovering from Panda. Of course quality is subjective, and Google has it’s own view of what this entails. Luckily for webmasters Google has essentially laid out exactly what it is looking for from content, specifically with regards to the Panda update.
Googe has pretty much given webmaster the rules of the road to Panda recovery, even if they’re not official rules. You’ve probably seen the list before, but if you were never hit by the Panda update until now, maybe you haven’t. Either way, here are the questions Google listed last year as “questions that one could use to assess the quality of a page or an article:
  • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  • Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
  • Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
  • Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
  • Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
  • Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
  • Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
  • Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
  • How much quality control is done on content?
  • Does the article describe both sides of a story?
  • Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
  • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
  • Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
  • For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
  • Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
  • Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
  • Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
  • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
  • Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  • Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
  • Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
  • Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
  • Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
Of course, Google uses over 200 signals in all, but that should get you started on thinking about your site’s content.
And with regards to the EMD update, remember, Google is targeting “low quality” EMDs. Not simply EMDs in general.
We’ve provided tons of coverage of the Panda update since Google first launched it. To learn more about it, feel free to peruse the Panda section of WebProNews.
Do you think Google has improved its search results with this algorithm combo? Is Google being transparent enough about algorithm updates for your taste? Let us know what you think in the comments.

 
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