Google has taken steps to get rid of annoying backlinks that reduce the optimization of the website created by owners. They have introduced the tool called as “Google Disavow” that aids site owners to remove the bad links from their posts. The request is sent to Google and after due processing, these links are removed.
But the question arises how do you categorize the links on your website as bad? There must be some criteria to decide. Before finding the criteria, we must look deep inside the problem first.
Backlinks are incoming links to your website that result in opening another page. Basically, these links get posted on your site without your control. These links get engaged with your pages and link other pages with your posts. There was a time when such links were deliberately used by some bloggers to increase their blog traffic.
Google also had a faulty algorithm to rank the websites in terms of links involved. The blog posts didn’t have any good material but the external links were enough to increase the Google ratings.
There were heaps of links on web pages that hardly had any relevance to the actual topic on the page. Hence, users searching on Google came up with pages that contained many spam links that had only useless information or absolutely no information at all. Previously, SEO considered the criteria of external links of the web page as a good sign for ranking.
It is not necessary that all backlinks are spam and useless. There are some genuine links that may add value to your blog posts. These links provide relevant information about your blog posts and searches on Google will be ranked high since your page has pertinent links.
Google’s Policy
Now, after the Google has practiced badly in the past, they have decided to sort out the situation to support the bloggers who work really hard to write their blog posts. Previously, they didn’t get the traffic that their posts really worth due to the backlinks of irrelevant pages.
There were some excellent bloggers who got high traffic initially but people visiting their sites were directed to those pages which had plenty of backlinks because those pages were falsely ranked higher.
Now, Google uses disavowing policy to counteract the backlinks on your pages. This tool is for those advanced bloggers who really work genuinely hard to make their pages worth visiting. Their extensive research should be regarded accordingly by placing them in Google high ranks.
Google Disavow tool will remove the backlinks that reduce the reputation of your pages on your request. You should sort out those backlinks that are harming the rank of your webpage and put them forward to Google for disavowing them. There is a tool called ‘Link Audit’ that helps you deciding the value of backlinks for your page.
Disavowed links are submitted to Google in a single file per domain name. Therefore, if multiple people are using the similar domain name, then make sure that only one file is submitted otherwise there will be a complete mess of the disavowed backlinks and Google may reject your request.
It is also possible to disavow links manually by requesting the owners of the backlinks’ sites. If they don’t pay heed to your request, you can submit the URL name to Google to remove from one page. To remove a specific back link from the entire domain, submit the request in the following format: “domain: www.url.com”. You can include only one URL per line.
Misuse of Disavowing
Misuse of disavowing links may be practiced by clever bloggers. They keep the backlinks until they are putting their web pages on top of Google and try to submit the request for disavowing them before getting penalized by Google.
Although, there are not restrictions on the Google disavowing policies at the moment but if false practices continue, Google might have to impose strict rules and regulations for observing genuine requests by creative and novel users.
How to Use Google Disavow?
The Google Disavow tool works live and you need to be logged in to your website as owner to disavow links. See your domain listed on Google disavow link and click the red button to start disavowing links. A box pops up that requires you to upload request file up to 2MB.