How Google’s Disavow Tool Helps Webmasters to Stay Safe From Negative SEO?

The Disavow tool is the part of Google Search Console that allows websites to mark down the value of an inbound link, helping to avert against link-based penalties. Since Google’s war on link spam puts the risk of organic search penalty at some online businesses, it makes disavow tool a significant asset for websites to stay safe from the risk of being penalized. In simple words, it can be stated that “If you find that the ranking of your website is being harmed due to low-quality links you do not control, you should ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site and disavow them.

What Is the Key Purpose of Using Disavow Tool?

The key reason to disavow links is to protect the website from “bad” links that are harming its rank and reputation on the SERP. Bad links can be created because of many reasons – users may accidentally create them by talking about the store on an unsavory site, competitors can use them to rank higher in the SERPs and so on. No matter what reason causes for the bad links build-ups, they hurt online businesses and the disavow tool is one such way that can stop this harm.

Google’s Disavow Tool Aim to Fight Negative SEO?

Negative SEO can be defined as the links which are created by someone else toward your site, i.e. links that you do not control. Google’s disavow tool explicitly says it is for negative SEO but here the big question is, does Disavow tool really help the webmasters to combat against the negative SEO.

While the most obvious meaning of Disavow tool it to prove that negative SEO is a real issue otherwise why would Google roll out such a tool, nonetheless, not all webmasters are expert enough to use the disavow tool to shape negative SEO. Unscrupulous SEO may target competing websites with devastating effect. To cater to this need, webmasters can take help of professional SEO Services to do the favor for them.

Does Disavow Tool Solve The Problem?

While the whole point of the Disavow tool is to help webmasters protect against negative SEO attacks, the point here is does it actually solve the problem? The answer is ‘NO’ because the Disavow tool does not protect people against penalties and only make the webmasters aware of problems when they are penalized. By that point it is too late. The website has already tanked out of the rankings and the damage has been done. Now, the webmasters have to spend next few months cleaning up the things, often due to no fault of their own. By the time webmaster clean up that…. Millions of other bad links would have been created. So, do you think a webmaster with the Google Disavow tool can keep up with that volume? I doubt it.

It is quite clear that Disavow tool does not protect against negative SEO; all it does is to clean up the aftermath of an attack.

How to Properly Disavow Links?

• You can start by compiling a list of backlinks with the help of available tools.
• Once you have the complete list of backlinks, it is time to identify bad backlinks.
• To identify the bad backlinks, you can manually visit each one and evaluate whether or not the link is sensible and genuinely useful. If it seems genuine, Google will probably not penalize it. So, there is no reason to disavow it but if it seems suspicious, there is a good reason to try and remove it.
• Once you are done with identifying the bad backlinks, contact whoever owns the site and ask him/her to remove that link.
• If the site’s owner does not respond or refuse to remove the link, you can ask Google to disavow it and show the documentation where you asked the site owner to remove the link but it was not done. Google almost always accepts disavow requests that include such documentation.
• As per Matt Cutts, the process of Google disavowing the links to your site will not be immediate and it may take weeks to take effect.

If you feel that you have been a victim of negative SEO, try to gather as much information as you can about the negative SEO. Also, try to keep an open eye on all the factors that can be the reason behind your site is dropping its ranking in search engine result pages. If you don’t find yourself efficient in doing all these on your own, consider hiring the Local SEO Services to do the job for you.