Back in October, 2012, there was a lot of buzz among the SEO community about Google’s new ‘Link Disavow Tool’: but what exactly was all the fuss about? And how can this new development help your website’s ranking?
Why did Google develop the disavow tool?
As a major online powerhouse, Google is known for many things: its wide range of ground-breaking software, cutting-edge cloud computing services and advanced marketing technologies: but above all, this mega-corporation is best known for its industry-leading search engine;
One of the main reasons why Google’s search is trusted by so many worldwide is the incredible accuracy and relevance of the results it returns.
In order to improve upon this heavily refined tool, Google’s search engine algorithm is constantly being remixed, tweaked and tested by the corporation’s multi-national team of boffins, to ensure that Google’s search retains its position of dominance online.
With this in mind, the link disavowing tool was developed in order to give webmasters the power to protect their website rankings from poor-quality inbound links.
What does Google consider to be ‘bad’ links?
When assessing a website in order to determine how prominently it should appear in its rankings, inbound-link quality is one of the key factors which Google’s search engine algorithm takes into consideration: low-quality links result in poorer rankings – and in this case, ‘low quality’ can refer to inorganic, unnatural, ‘spammy’ or paid links;
The end result is that Google’s algorithm can now easily detect artificial attempts to manipulate its results: such efforts will typically result in poorer rankings, or even a domain ban for any site which uses this kind of tactics.
How can the link disavowing tool help me?
Unfortunately, not every webmaster is in control of the links that come in to their site: they may have enlisted in the services of a ‘black-hat’ SEO company during a marketing push, or could even have become the victim of a ‘negative SEO’ campaign, from an unscrupulous competitor.
In any event, when a website’s ranking is being harmed by poor-quality inbound links, the link disavowing tool can be used to tell Google to simply ‘ignore’ them: this means that only organic, natural and relevant links will be taken into account by Google’s algorithm – essentially making the ‘bad’ links worthless (in either a positive or negative context).
If you own or maintain a website which is not performing as well as it should in the search engine rankings, you might want to consider looking into the quality of your inbound links: Google offers a free range of webmaster tools, which will give you the power to monitor various statistics relating to your website and its inner workings: as part of this suite, the disavow tool can then be used to remove poor-quality inbound links, so that they are no longer a factor.
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