I don’t often get the chance to attend the Google Webmaster Central office hours livestream, but I find it helpful to watch the recording afterwards for one good tip, troubleshooting advice, or reinforcement on something I don’t work with frequently.
If you’re not familiar with Google Webmaster Central office hours, they’re a weekly online YouTube livestream where you can ask Google staff and other experts questions about Google Search Console, your site, problems you’re trying to resolve.
And the November 14, 2017 Google Webmaster Center office hours provided me with helpful reminders about Google’s Disavow Links tool and how it works.
What is Google Disavow Links Tool?
Google wants to know what your site is about. It uses links to your site (also known as backlinks) as one of a couple hundred factors to assess your site and relevancy of your content.
When you have numerous spammy, paid, or low-quality links to your content, it can affect how Google assesses your site. And that impacts your PageRank.
If you’ve done your best to remove spammy links, asking to have the links removed, but nothing happens, you have no control over those links.
They’re causing issues for your site, what can you do?
That’s where Google’s Disavow Links tool comes into play.
Using the tool, you can submit links you want to disavow to Google. And they’ll take action to remove the links so they’re not considered in Google’s algorithms.
It’s a two-step process where you first get a list of the spammy links to your site, then submit the list to Google.
Get List of Links You Want to Disavow
From Google’s Disavow backlinks support page, you’ll want to first log in to Google Search Console. Then follow these steps:
- Choose the site where you want to find links
- From the Dashboard, select Search Traffic > Links to Your Site
- In the Who Links the Most section, select More
- Select Download more sample links
Edit the list in a text editor to only include the spammy links you want to disavow. Include one link on each line.
If you want to ignore an entire domain, use the format: “domain:example.com” in your text file.
Remember, the list is for links you want Google to ignore.
Submit List to Google
Once you have the list of links you want to disavow, visit Google’s Disavow Links page and follow these steps:
- Choose the website you want to submit the disavow links list
- Select Disavow links
- Select Choose file
Note: if you’ve submitted a list of disavow links in the past, the new file will overwrite any previously uploaded files.
According to their help page, it can take Google a while to process your list, potentially a number of weeks.
Summary
Having spammy or low-quality links to your site can affect how Google views your site.
Take control of links by asking sites to remove their links. If they don’t, ask Google to remove the links by submitting the links to the Disavow Links tool.
