The disavow tool introduced by Google is used to address the issue in website inbound links. Inbound links to a website are well-known indication to move up in search results and increase the page rank. If website builds unnatural back-links like paid, reciprocal, spammy links and other link schemes which violates Google guidelines, website drop-off automatically in search engine result page, together affecting the website page rank.
Now a days, Google acts heavily to point out harmful third-party website inbound links. When Google identify low quality links directing to your site, it will send toxic links notification via webmaster tool to the site owner. Once the message is received, Website owner takes immediate action to find and remove the low quality inbound links pointed by Google. This is the great approach path to dispatch the toxic links directly.
The list of links submitted in Google Disavow tool will not be removed permanently from its index but the link value passed from them will not be considered any more. Google does this by adding a no-follow tag to the low quality links specified. When a link is considered as no-follow, no value passes to the website. Hence the website stay safe from the future search engine algorithms.
While uploading toxic links in webmaster tool, no need to add No-follow links.
Rules of Google Disavow Tool Usage
- The disavow file which is updated in webmaster tool, should be a text file (.txt).
- While entering the domain or link in the file, each line must contain single URL and comments must start with “#” symbol at every line.
- If website owner need to remove entire domain of a specific inbound link, add Domain: at the commencing of the URL, e.g., domain:example.com.
- If site owner requires only specific pages from the website, add particular web pages e.g., http://example.com/webpage.html.
- Don’t exceed the maximum upload size limit of 2 MB.
Procedure to Disavow low quality Back-links
There is a two-step procedure to disavow the back links
1) Website owner download the list of back-links in webmaster tool.
- Click your website in webmaster tools home page.
- On the left of website dashboard, click the menu of Search traffic and choose “Links to your site”.
- Click More, which is under Who Links Most and download the latest links.
2) Upload the file in Google disavow tool.
- Make a notepad file, carrying list of inbound links which you need to disavow.
- While specifying the links, kindly write in comment why you want to remove this back-link.
- Log in to Google web master account, Go to Disavow Tool page and upload the list of links which you want to disavow.
After uploading the disavow file, If site owner mistakenly added some quality websites in disavow file, Google crawls and adds a no-follow tag. In such a case, site owner should download the disavow file and remove the quality URLs then re-upload in webmaster tool. Google again crawls the URLs then change to Do-Follow and consider as valuable back-links.
Readers are welcome to share their experiences with Google Disavow Tool before in the comments section!!!
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