Last night, while we slept in the UK, Matt Cutts announced at PubCon that Google have finally added the Disavow Links tool that we’ve been expecting ever since Bing added theirs back in June. So is it time to start discarding links?

Barry Schwartz was the first to break the news live on Search Engine Round Table, but an official announcement soon emerged on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. You can also read an in-depth post about the new tool written live at PubCon by Danny Sullivan.

Here is the Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video on Disavowing Links:

Whereas Bing’s user friendly tool simply asks you to submit a page or domain that you don’t like, Google’s comes with multiple warnings and is marked as an ‘Advanced Tool’.

This is very interesting. In the official announcement, Google’s Jonathan Simon recommends using the tool only as a last result if you have received an ‘unnatural links’ warning from Google in Webmaster Tools.

In Matt’s video, he also says you should be emailing webmasters multiple times with link removal requests before using the tool to disavow the last few links. He has obviously never tried to get hold of the owner of a spammy links directory…

Hopefully, if you’ve been on our SEO course this won’t be a problem for you! We follow a sustainable SEO practice that’s all about making your site better, rather than trying to con the algorithm. It takes a bit more effort, but the rewards are worth it.

When Should you Use the Tool?

According to the advice about you should only use the tool if:

• You have received an unnatural links warning
• You have tried to contact the owners of low quality/spammy links to your site multiple times with no response

However, as with any announcement like this from Google it’s likely that Webmasters who aren’t ranking number 1 for their target keywords will ignore the official advice and there will be a rush to get as many links disavowed as possible.

When Shouldn’t you Use the Tool?

It will be very tempting, unless you’re ranking top for everything, to do a complete purge of your links and try and get everything disallowed. But wait!

Think before you act or you might shoot yourself in the foot. Links are still a strong ranking factor for Google, so you run the risk of actually dropping in SERPs.

If you’re on page 1 for a target keyword, you might do much better by building some new strong links rather than submitting a giant list of links you don’t like to Google.

It can take ‘multiple weeks’ for Google to consider your disavow links, so if you submit a list and lose rankings, it will then take weeks to undisavow (for lack of a better word) those links again.

What if They’re Not My Links?

Site owners have been asking for a Disavow Link tool ever since Google started actively penalising bad links rather than ignoring them.

This is a problem because it opens up the possibility of negative SEO – building spammy links to your competitors. There’s also nothing stopping the owners of spammy sites linking to you just for the sake of it – maybe they genuinely think your site is useful!

Google’s official stance is that if you didn’t actively build the links (or hire somebody to do so) then you shouldn’t worry as this will already have been picked up by the algorithm.

Just in case, we recommend performing a link audit if you have the technical ability/ tools at hand. That way you can examine your link graph and determine if it looks at all spammy – lots of low quality links and no good ones.

Links to Avoid/ Remove/ Disavow

If you’re an active SEO you should be aware of these anyway, but as a refresher here Google’s guidelines on links:

• Bought or sold links – including in exchange for goods or services
• Link exchanges/ reciprocal links
• Link wheels
• Blog networks
• Automated link programs
• Low quality/ unrelated/ SEO link directories and bookmark sites
• Links embedded in widgets
• Blog and forum comments that don’t provide value
• Footer/ sidebar links across entire sites and networks

Most of the above tactics have worked in the past and some report that they still do. However, these are the sorts of links Google hate so if you or somebody on your behalf has been building links in this way, and you are sure that it is having an adverse effect on your rankings then Google’s Disavow Links Tool may just become your new best friend.

Just don’t forget that one day of creating something really great on the web can be a lot more valuable than a week spent trying to clean things up.

We would like to hear your thoughts, do you think that using the tool would have a positive or negative effect on your rankings? And if so, will you use it? Leave a comment below!

Image by bradleygee on Flickr.

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Disavow links, disavow links tool, google, google links, google seo, link building, linkspam, Matt Cutts, SEO, seo links, webspam

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