From time to time, you may want to disavow links from certain websites you manage or own. There may be sites that you do not want your website associated with, possible link penalties and so on. You may find links from websites that you are not able to manually remove your link, so the next best option is to use the Disavow Link option with Google.
Disavow Link Notice
- Do not use the disavowal tool unless you absolutely sure you need to use it.
- If possible, try and remove all the links from the pages/sites in question first.
What does the Disavow Link Tool do?
The link disavowal tool simply allows website owners to tell Google they do not want certain links from pages/domains to count as an incoming links to their website. Ideally you would want to attempt to have the link removed manually, but many times this is not possible, and this is where the Disavow Link Tool comes in play. Instead of simply Disavowing certain pages from a domain, it is recommended that you instead Disavow the entire domain. Even if you do not have a Google Penalty, you may want to use this from time to time.
Where to download the links
You will need to go to your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you don’t have one for your website, now is a good time to do so.
- Click on your Url in the Webmaster Tools homepage
- Click Search Traffic in the Dashboard
- Now click on Links to your site
- Under Who links the most, click More.
- Now Click Download more sample links. If you click Download latest links, you’ll see dates as well.
- Click on Download this table to get a quick overview of the domains that link to you.
- Next, make sure that you download latest links. This will provide you with the exact link and date that the url was found/indexed with Google.
Note: You will want to verify that you have both www and non www versions of your site listed in GWMT. Each website is treated as a different site, so you will want to check the links in both sites, and compare. There could be links going to the non www version that are not linking directly to the www version. On a side note, if you are not 301 redirecting your site from non www to www, or vice versa, you will want to do so. This will help prevent in creating duplicate results of your website and content in the search engines. Also, using a 301 Redirect will pass on any link juice to the intended target.
It is recommend that you only disavow backlinks you believe that there are a significant number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links to your site, and if you are assured that the links are causing problems for you.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
# SomeExample.com removed most links, but missed these
http://spam.SomeExample.com/things/comments.html
http://spam.SomeExample.com/extras/paid-links.html
# Contacted owner of DontListMeHere.com on 1/2/2013 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:DontListMeHere.com
Just to note, below was reported by https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/most-frequently-disavowed-domains-urls-ips-cctlds/. Would you really need to disavow those particular top 10? If these are the same type of links that many different sites receive, then you may want to hold off on disavowing them.
Disavow is a very powerful tool, so be-careful when using it!
Gerard Manning is the owner of Manning Search Marketing and has been working in the SEO industry since 2000. Originally started with Enquiro Search Solutions (now known as Mediative). Was previously a Research Assistant on Inside the Mind of the Searcher that was released in 2005.