If you know about, SEO then you must know about backlinks. Backlinks are a necessary part that helps in the ranking of your website. There are two types of backlinks: Good and bad. Good backlinks help to improve a website's ranking, whereas bad backlinks can make your website in trouble. Google's Disavow tool can help you from bad backlinks. It protects your website from penalized links. SEO Experts with many years of experience somehow gets confused and guide you in a tricky way about Disavowing the links. They will probably say It depends or will say disavow those links that create a threat to your website.
Do you know the reason behind creating a Disavow tool? Let us understand the purpose behind creating this tool by Google and what is the need for it?
With the help of Google's Disavow tool, you can interact with Google directly and tell about the backlinks to avoid. Now the question will come up, how can you do it? For that, you have to create a text file in which you have to include the backlinks or domain that you want to disavow. Then in Google Search Console, you can submit the file to disavow those links.
Now you know how you can disavow links, but do you know how to find those
links? The process of deciding the backlinks or domains to include in the
disavow file is complicated. First, we will understand the history. Google
introduced the Disavow tool in 2012. At that time, Google sends messages to
those who work on link building "Your Website disappears from the search
results." It was because of bad quality backlinks. The issue got fixed
using Disavow tool using Google Search Console.
Disavow tool is still helpful in 2021? It depends. How can you decide which
backlink should be disavowed? A low-quality link affects the ranking of your
website or violates the Google Webmaster guideline. If there is any external
link on your website that does not have any relevance, also it is not helpful
to the users. Remove that link from your website. There might be some unwanted
links that are harming your website. There are some sources to know about those
links.
1.
Non-Editorial, Dofollow links are some paid variants of
Google to qualify page rank. Paid links are worst and violate Google's
guidelines.
2.
Earlier, Google de-indexed private blogging networks
because they don't come under Google's algorithm. Google penalize that websites
that do not follow the guidelines and links created by these networks are
spammy.
3.
If some website gets hacked, then the links from the
website will be counted as spammy links. That can cause you a website penalty.
4.
One of the reasons behind spammy or low-quality links is
negative SEO by creating backlinks on low-quality websites.
Now, you know the types of spammy or low-quality links. But how to choose
amongst them? Because sometimes a low-quality link can also give benefit to our
website.
Work on Link Auditing: Do link auditing regularly. It will help in deciding the
low-quality links. In the site explorer, you can audit the three reports. These
three reports Referring Domains Graph, Anchors Cloud & the last CTLD
distribution maps will help.
In Referring Domain graph, you can project the links (spammy links caused
by negative SEO). Anchors Cloud will let you know about the over-optimized
links. CTLD(country code top-level domain) map helps you in getting the report
of the backlink profile. Optimize the three reports if everything looks good.
Move ahead to the next step.
Full Link Auditing: This is the next step after optimizing the reports. Check
the quality of the link that it is relevant. Check the Google Search Console
data for backlink analysis. To check on the backlinks, you can use site
explorer. In that case, you have to heed a few moves:
1.
Go to Site Explorer
2.
Enter your Website domain
3.
Next is Backlink Profile
4.
After that, go to Referring Domains
5.
Do filter for Dofollow links
6.
Then sort the data by DR(low to high)
Export the sheet. After that, look for Low DR and unusual TLD's for
auditing links. Use built-in filters to filter uncommon TLD's. Check for links
that have low DR, spammy title, domain name and anchor text. Disavow these
types of domains or URLs. You can export the spammy links file from Ahrefs. It
will help in getting and identifying the links. Upload the file into GSC and
submit the file for disavow.
Check the format of the disavow file and upload it to Google's Disavow
Tool: You can check the format of the disavow file on Google. Before uploading
the new file on GSC, save the previously uploaded file and follow the format.
You can also upload the file exported from Ahref. Submitting disavow file
doesn't mean that Google will look into your website's links. So you do not
need to get panic about it.
Record the Progress after changes: Once you submit the disavow
file, it takes time to appear the efforts. Google takes time and re-crawls the
links for the assessment of backlink profiles.
Whether you do disavow or not, recording and evaluating the backlink profile is an essential part of SEO. This way, you can identify the links & disavow those links using Google Search Console.
We can say everyone at some point needed to submit a disavow file, whether
it's due to low-quality backlinks or negative SEO. So, You should disavow those
links before Google indexes those links and penalize your website. But before
doing that, take help from tools to identify those links that you need to
disavow. Because disavowing every link before recognizing, can lead to low
website traffic and a downfall in keyword's ranking. So next time, be careful
and do it in the right way.
