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Disavow Bad Links to Preserve Your SEO

Google’s new ’Disavow Links’ tool can help counteract the effects of Penguin for your website’s search engine ranking.

On April 24th 2012 Google unleashed the biggest change to its search engine algorithm in over 8 years – the dreaded “Penguin” update.

Google began penalising websites that obtained poor quality links, and websites that had too many “SEO Optimized” anchor text links.Good, relevant inbound links has been the cornerstone of best Search Engine Optimisation practice for many years, but the proliferation of link farms, ‘paid-for’ links and generally poor-quality inbound links can now actually damage the chances of your website ranking.

After the latest Penguin update it became clear that certain backlinks can actually damage your website ranking and those who had been penalised in the update found it very difficult to remove these negative inbound links from their site. These link-based penalties immediately impacted on many sites ability to generate revenues from their online properties causing great dissatisfaction in the ranks of webmasters and site owners.

However, on October 17th, Google announced the much anticipated “Disavow Links” tool in Google Webmaster Tools.This tool finally gives webmasters the much-needed ability to tell Google to “ignore” specific links and domains from poor quality link-sources.Google’s new Disavow Links Tool allows any site owner to upload a list of URLs (or entire domains), with the promise that links from these aforementioned sites would be excluded from ranking algorithms within a matter of weeks.

This is a mixed bag of fortune for webmasters and site owners.

If you’ve been negatively impacted by Penguin, and have tried to remove as many links as you can but still can’t seem to recover, then you can use this new Link Disavow tool to essentially “delete” the poor quality links that are affecting your website.The effects don’t happen immediately; Google’s Matt Cutts revealed that it may take a few weeks for any links that you wish to be disavowed to take effect in the rankings.

For millions of website owners who have been hit by the Penguin Update and have done nothing to incur any penalties and who have been “collateral damage” – this is great news, but the downside is more worrying.By allowing webmasters the facility to report ‘bad’ links Google has put link-spam detection in the hands of the masses.

While this may appear a positive move, the consequence will be that millions of webmasters will now be submitting long lists of low-quality sites to Google, which will in turn add these to its algorithm which will then penalise not only the sites that provide these low quality links but also those sites that have backlinks from these ‘flagged’ sites.

This means that any site that is a source of ‘easy’ backlinks to your site is a potential target for this update.

’Easy’ back link sites include:

• Blog comment sites• Forums• Web 2.0 sites• Article Directories• Web Site Directories• Automated Blog Networks with no human-approval “citation” process• Social Bookmarking Accounts.

Sites that give out too many links, too easily will most likely see poor pages (or even their entire domain) get penalised.But what’s worse is that a penalized domain may also penalise any other sites that it links out to.

If Google identifies a website as being ripe for link-exploitation, and a lot of websites are using it to build easy links, then it may infer that anyone also using that site for links is a candidate for penalty.There is even the opportunity for unscrupulous site-owners to penalise their competitors sites by creating links from the sites that have been identified as ‘bad’ link sources by Google!

What does Google require from a Link and how do you identify which are poor-quality or high-quality links?

In its most basic terms , a link is a ‘vote’ for a site from another site, with the process being based on the academic paper publishing process, where a paper would cite another paper in its references. The more citations a paper has, the more authority or importance it has.In Google’s view, good links are those by which an actual human being been involved in the link approval process; conversely ‘bad’ links are those that can be created without any human intervention or actual review.

There is a proliferation of automated software link building tools in the marketplace that makes auto-submissions to ‘easy’ link sites to exploit the backlinking loophole that previously existed.Google have updated their guidelines to linking so your first point of call should be their website to check out the latest rule changes.

With the constantly changing SEO environment, just how do you second guess – or even outsmart Google?

Well, for starters, Google has a strong reliance on Social Media for its ranking algorithms and now is the time to review and update your current SEO strategies and align them more closely with your Social Media and Market positioning plansSEO in a Post-Penguin/Disavow Tool WorldWe strongly believe that with Google’s bias towards Social Media ranking factors becoming more important, using a sophisticated Social Media / Market Leadership strategy with a strong SEO focus in mind is the best way to improve rankings in the months to come.

If you have participated in any form of link exchange system on your website, now is the time to remove it or cancel your participation, thus avoiding yet another Google ‘Slap’. With more and more people taking advantage of the disavow procedure to remove bad links, the collateral damage is likely to be wide ranging, so you need to distance your site from these poor links to enhance your listing in Google searches.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James McRoy .