Changes in the disavow tool: do you know what it is used for?
Jordi Ordóñez
26/11/2020
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Google announces changes in the disavow tool and we ask ourselves: do you know what it is and what it is used for? It is a really important tool in SEO.
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For some time now, Google has been trying to update and improve its control panel, the famous Google Search Console, as they did some years ago with Google Ads.Unlike that case, with SEO console they have been progressive. Little by little, they are adding functionalities or changing some existing ones to make them more efficient.This time, it is the turn of one of the most powerful and delicate tools for off-page SEO and the generation of authority: we are talking about the disavow tool.
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What is disavow tool?
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Let's explain what it is for those who are less familiar with this subject. It is a tool that allows you to disallow certain links or domains linking to a website.Surely you must be wondering: "why would I want to remove links, considering how difficult it is to get them? Well, the answer is simple, in fact: not all links are good or benefit us.In certain cases they can generate penalties and manual actions as a result of what the search engine considers to be the use of link patterns and an attempt to manipulate the authority of our eCommerce.
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When should I use this tool?
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You know that it is feasible to make legitimate and effective linkbuilding by working with much care in the relationships with other websites. But there are times when things can get out of control and we end up being linked from toxic sites.This can happen due to some bad management of the off-page SEO (most professionals would never do this, but there are always exceptions), because of ignorance of the origin of the links or even because someone has operated in bad faith trying to carry out a negative SEO attack on our site.For any of these cases, Google has proposed this tool that allows the owner of the site to disallow toxic links.
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How to use the disavow tool
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The mechanical part is not so complicated. What happens is that it is part of a rather tedious and long process when you have a large volume of negative links and you want to do it correctly.To start, you have to enter the Google account that owns the site you want to act on in Google Search Console.Now, you can access directly to this link to go to the disavow tool, choose the property in question in the drop-down menu among all those available and upload a disavow document.
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How to make a disavow
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This is the most delicate part (and boring, there is no point in denying it). In fact, I would recommend that, before starting this process, you consider if it is really necessary.Actually, a couple of links from directories or other low quality sites within a healthy link profile is not that bad. This tool should be used when, once that profile has been analyzed, we see that there is an obvious risk of being penalized or when notification has been received that you have been penalized.
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Previous analysis
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But if you are clear that you have to go ahead with the de-authorization, the next step is always to try to solve it by our means rather than going to Google.Get a list as extensive as possible of all the links that point to you. In Google Search Console there is an exclusive section dedicated to this, but going to some external tool like Ahrefs (which is paid, but very powerful) could be of more help to you. This type of software offers you the added value of being able to evaluate the relevance and authority of the sites.
Mark in red those that:- Are of a "suspicious" typology such as the mentioned directories, comments in blogs or media and those paid that are more evident.
- Come from sites in other languages and alphabets (typically Russian, Indian, Chinese...) and whenever it does not make sense to link to you.
- Directly have a very low level of authority and too poor content.
In general, the premise is to avoid everything that can be considered SPAM, that contextually has nothing to do with our website or that we consider can be harmful to us... but do not overdo it either, because not all "bad quality" links are necessarily harmful and losing many links at once is equivalent to falling into organic positioning.Try to contact the owners of those websites through their contact page and ask them kindly to remove them. When there is good faith they may do so. When the intention is fraudulent or negative, they may even ask for financial compensation for doing so.It does not matter: just leave it all in your email (some people use an account exclusively to do the disavow). -
Creating the document
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The document itself is very simple. Just list all the domains and URLs you want to disallow in a .txt file (with the same notepad, no formatting or anything)
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You can add comments using the (#) pad, this will give context to the request.It should look something like this:
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Two pages to be disallowed http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html
# One domain to be disallowed
domain:shadyseo.com -
As far as limitations and formatting, there are just a few things to keep in mind, such as:
- The file must be UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII coded text.
- The file extension will always be .txt.
- URLs longer than 2048 characters cannot be included.
- Files with a length of more than 100,000 lines (including blank lines) or with a weight exceeding 2 MB will not be accepted.
Ready. Now all that is left is to access the tool, upload the file and wait for Google to give us an answer. -
What changes in this new version?
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Some small but interesting changes have been announced in this November 2020 updateBasically, the user interface has been improved as they have done with the rest of the console, but they have also added the possibility of downloading the file as a text document and have removed certain limits when communicating errors. The latter is noteworthy because in the previous version it only informed us of the first 10 issues.
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Do you dare to use the disavow tool or will you only do it if it is strictly necessary? Share your thoughts with us.
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Images | Unsplash, Google.