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.
