Google uses hundreds of different “signals” to determine where a webpage should rank in its index. Among the most significant off-page ranking signals is backlinks. If a website has dozens of high-quality backlinks from other authoritative and relevant sites, Google may increase its search rankings. Consequently, however, a website with backlinks from questionable websites containing nothing more than spam could have an opposite effect on the site’s search rankings — at least that’s a concern many webmasters have.
The Fear of Negative SEO
Negative search engine optimization (SEO) is the belief that creating lots of low-quality backlinks can hurt a website’s search rankings. In an effort to curb these fears, Google released a special tool that allows webmasters to essentially block Google’s algorithm from counting certain backlinks. So if you discover a handful of bad links, you can add them to Google’s disavow tool.
Is Disavowing Bad Links Really Necessary?
But there’s still some question over whether or not it’s really necessary to disavow bad links. Google does a pretty good job at identifying legitimate websites and ranking them accordingly in its index, so it’s doubtful that a bad link will cause any serious harm.
To better answer this question, Google’s John Mueller tackled this topic in a recent Hangout. One user asked Mueller if he needed to disavow links for his e-commerce site since it recently changed its product inventory. Mueller responded by saying the following:
“…in general, if you are just doing site maintenance, changing things on your web site, that wouldn’t be a case where you’d need to disavow your backlinks,” said Mueller. “Disavowing backlinks is really mostly for the case where there are really problematic links pointing to your page and you want to say I want nothing to do with that,” he added.
How to Use Google’s Disavow Tool
Nonetheless, some business owners and digital marketers may still want to use Google’s disavow tool, especially if there’s a particularly troubling link (or several links) pointing to their site. Before you can use it, however, you’ll first need to acquire a list of all backlinks pointing to your site. This can be done using Google Webmaster Tools or a third-party program. Assuming you use Google Webmaster Tools, simply click Search Traffic > Links to Your Site > and “More” under “Who links the most.” From here, you can download a list of all pages containing your backlink.
After going through this list and separating the good links from the bad ones, you should add the bad links to Google’s disavow tool. Simply click this link and follow the instructions. Don’t expect to see any results immediately, though. It may take Google several weeks or even months before it updates the changes.
