What Is The Google Disavow Tool?
What the Google Disavow tool does is allow you to upload links and tell Google to ignore them when it is ranking your site.
Publishers have control over whether Google will disavow certain links on their site.
Disavow or not to disavow?
Ostensibly there is a central question: does every website require a disavow file? The unequivocal answer to that question is a resounding: no! Not every website needs a compelling disavow file. In fact, in the scale of things, relatively few websites need to actively monitor and manage their backlink signals. Websites such as personal blogs, government platforms, charities, non-governmental websites, even small niche or local webshops frequently aren’t in acute need to disavow spam backlinks. The reason for this is that these websites rarely conduct link building. Many thrive on direct traffic and have neither the capacity nor the desire to improve their Google rankings. Often their target audience is aware of and familiar with their presence. Hence type-in traffic represents almost all of the traffic they enjoy. Consequently, they rarely if ever actively pursue PageRank, passing backlinks that Google, in turn, may frown upon. With relatively few backlinks in all, disavowing is virtually a non-issue.
It is an entirely different situation when looking at commercial websites, such as online shops, price comparison platforms, market places, media outlets, portals or major brands. Their overriding commercial intent makes them susceptible to optimization, which may or may not always have been Google Webmaster Guidelines compliant. Google remains adamant with regard to, in Google’s mind, not merit based backlinks, hence managing backlink risks is for these websites a critical part of conducting online business. They need to use the Disavow Tool as a shield protecting their organic rankings.
There’s also a situation where every affected website must use the Disavow Tool in their defense. That’s when a Google manual spam action aka manual penalty due to link building is in place. As a general rule, any Google penalty should be removed as swiftly as possible. However, a penalty in relation to backlinks, in particular, must be addressed immediately, since it progressively impacts the website’s position in Google Search Results.
When to disavow?
There are a number of important, yet only two main factors which must be considered if backlinks may constitute a liability for the website: the volume of incoming backlinks and their quality. The first indicator can frequently be gauged almost instantly, by looking at the total number of backlinks reported in trustworthy third party tools such as Majestic. For example, the minimum number of backlinks ever recorded pointing to example.com is the sum of fresh and historic total combined. While no single tool is capable of providing an exact figure, approximately 300 million backlinks is a substantial number that in case of a commercial website may warrant a review and updating the disavow file. Majestic, similarly to other great data gathering tools recommended later in this guide, is unlikely to detect all backlinks ever to be in existence. Like all other commercial tools, it may not identify private (blog) backlink networks, created specifically in order to avoid third party detection. PBNs are however a ludicrous concept from its inception. Link building is explicitly done for Google, backlinks must be detectable by Google and therefore always pose a clear liability to the website’s rankings.
Google Search Console, while indispensable in the process, can’t be considered as the ultimate data source because of the build in reporting limit, capping samples at 100.000 backlinks. That having said, when looking for a tangible threshold 100.000 backlinks may be taken as a rule of thumb. Fewer backlinks likely do not warrant the effort required for disavowing. More backlinks may, potentially.
The second main indicator -quality- is significantly less simple to even ascertain, let alone to accurately assess. Backlink quality depends on the type of anchor text used, anchor text distribution, the quality of content surrounding backlink anchors, as well as where else the same page links to. In a nutshell, it can only be analyzed by experienced human experts armed with powerful, purpose built tools which help to expedite the process. No tools however can fully replace this labour intensive, detail oriented approach. Manual analysis and investigating backlink quality requires crawling backlink data in a first, critical step.
Short of going through the entire process, there’s one additional indicator which can help to gauge how much of an acute risk a backlink profile may pose: the anchor text distribution. While there are no hard thresholds to observe, the ground rule is that the more the top ten anchor texts appear optimized for the specific products or services offered, the higher the probability that PageRank passing link building was conducted at some point in time. And that consequently legacy and fresh backlinks are more likely to pose a serious risk. Several tools offer insights in this regard, including Ahrefs and Majestic, with varying depth. Evaluating all but the top 10 anchor texts is however superfluous, since commercial anchors tend to surface to the top anyway.
Features
Expired domains backlinks
While investigating backlink risk levels, some sites or, in this instance, domains are more easily recognized as spam and therefore harmful then others. Expired domains, that’s previously legitimate websites, dropped by their original operators just to be revived with scraped or templated content in the hope to benefit from reputation built in the past. They are a clear violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines and a black hat SEO smoking gun. Consequently all expired domains must be disavowed. Such sites are almost universally auto generated and therefore easily to spot and to filter. Where there is even a shadow of a doubt, the Internet Archive provides invaluable and free of charge services, showing most sites past records.
Hacked sites backlinks
Similarly to expired domains, all legitimate yet compromised e.g. hacked websites, unknowingly linking through injected code without the legitimate operators consent, must be disavowed. Since this method as a trend is in decline, typically even for very large backlink profiles there will be only a hand-full of hacked websites in their backlink profile. This is the only group which may be revisited periodically to reassess the situation. Sites that have been cleansed of injected backlinks and content can be safely removed for the disavow file, however this is an optional step.
Press release backlinks
PageRank passing press release backlinks, especially the ones bearing commercial anchor texts as mentioned specifically in Google Linking Guidelines, must all be included in a compelling disavow file. Google has time and again highlighted their stands on press release link building and maintains their position that doing so is a clear Webmaster Guidelines offence. Veteran Google employees including John Muller have repeatedly reiterated on the specific point.
Affiliate backlinks
Google does not look unkindly at affiliate websites in general. PageRank passing affiliate backlinks however, are considered a thorn in the side, since they are not merit based as far as Google is concerned. Consequently, when managing backlink risks, all affiliate backlinks must be included in the disavow file. Coupon or special deals websites, as well as price comparison platforms, are worthy of special attention. By far not all of these legitimate services choose to ignore Google Linking Guidelines intentionally, however the ultimate responsibility to check, remains as with all backlinks with the site operator concerned for his or her websites Google rankings.
Directories backlinks
All SEO and link directories must be disavowed. At this point there are no legitimate reasons to make any exceptions. There are countless giveaways betraying the sole purpose for directories existence, which is passing PageRank. Among these are the fact that almost no directories are moderated, they lack topicality or any oversight and frequently even the domains used highlight SEO or links rather than any other editorial value. While frequently and rightly seen as a legacy issue, directory backlinks remain a liability for websites even many years later.
What’s next?
For Google an individual disavow file represents a website operator recommendation, not a directive. Whether it chooses to follow that recommandation in full or partially isn’t however disclosed via Google Search Console. For the website operator, the very same disavow file represents a temporary protection shield. For how long it may provide some level of confidence, depends on subsequent backlink growth and its quality. While there are few general rules to follow, a disavow file should be revisited and updated based on fresh data at least once per year, as part of an annual maintenance cycle. When that reiteration happens, previously disavowed and newly detected spam backlink patterns must be combined into one new disavow file before uploading. Merely uploading new patterns will inevitably and irreversibly delete previously submitted spam backlink patterns and thereby undo the past good work.
The submitted disavow file has at the same time no impact on converting traffic forthcoming from included backlinks. In other words, while backlink risks are mitigated, whatever traffic may originate from the same suspicious backlinks, isn’t affected.
