How To Effectively Disavow Links?
If you are worried about when, why, and how to disavow links, you are not alone. Creating backlinks is important for SEO, but someone with the same backlinks can backfire. This happened because those backlinks became ‘Bad’ links.
We all know the importance of backlinks. Backlinks ensure the SEO juices flow on the website. However, while creating backlinks, people tend to prioritize quantity over quality.
With quantity, you cannot guarantee that every link you create is of high quality. Therefore, there are bound to have some bad links in the lot. These bad links affect your SEO efforts and affect the website’s health.
When marketers see the health of the website dropping, they initiate an SEO Audit to clear these backlinks or Disavow them. In fact, according to experts, you don’t necessarily need to allow search engines to scan all the links. Instead, you can simply submit a disavow to the search engine.
Before getting into disavowing links, you first need to know about the disavow tools.
What Is A Disavow Tool?
To understand how disavow works, you first need to understand what disavow tools are. A disavow tool is used to request search engines like Google to ignore low-quality backlinks on your website.
When you submit your request to Google to disavow links from your website, you are cutting all ties with the link.s yes, the links will be there on the website, but those links will not play any part in SEO ranking.
However, it is important to understand that even though you are requesting a search engine to disavow, the search engine is not obligated to respect your request. And even if the request is fulfilled, those links will be there in your backlink profile.
While disavowing links effectively ensure your domain is safe from bad links, you can also do the same with no-follow links. You can download NoFollow link checkers from The Pirate Bay and add a NoFollow tag to ensure crawlers are not scanning them.
How To Disavow Links In Google Search Console?
Every marketer with a Google tracking tag on their website has access to the Google Search Console tool. It houses all the information about your website and all its linking structure.
When there are some problems with your link, Google Search Console is the first place you go. There you can see all the external links connected to your website. With just a simple click, you can export the links.
Now you can audit the links to find which link has problems. Once you have identified the links, you can place them in the disavow list and submit them to the search engines.
However, if you want to do it manually, there is a specific process you need to follow. Don’t worry, the process is simple.
- Each entry needs to be in a different line.
- Each entry needs to start with a domain.
- The file name is not that important.
Weighing The Risks & Benefits
Disavowing your links is the perfect way to protect your website from bad links. However, if you are actually engaged in black hat SEO practices, there is a possibility that disavowing your file will help Google profile the links you create as bad. This will significantly affect the success of your next project.
Meanwhile, the benefits are poorly documented. You cannot be 100% sure that disavowing links helps your website in any way possible. However, experts have claimed that disavowing links has actually helped their website grow.
While we can see that disavowing practices come with both sides, it is on the individual how they use it. For example, if you have links you are confident are not doing any good, disavowing the links might put your mind at ease.
Conclusion
Disavowing is a great technique to protect your website and boost its organic ranking. However, we are yet to find any concrete proof.
What do you think about this?
I would love to hear your philosophies on this gray area.
Mustafa Al Mahmud is the Founder and CEO of Gizmo Concept and also a professional Blogger, SEO Professional as well as Entrepreneur. He loves to travel and enjoy his free moment with family members and friends.