Google Webmaster, A Tool that Removes Unnatural Links

Google has announced the disavow tool in October 2012, but they didn't give too many details about it. The new tool was received with much skepticism by SEO professionals. Although some of them supported it, because they secretly hoped that it would cleanse the world wide web from useless links, the truth is that they were left with nothing but questions. To start it, we will tell you that the tool works, so if you want to lift penalties and recover your rankings, you will have to follow a few simple steps.

Truth be told, Google could have ignored all these „spam links” and „questionable sites”, had they not been popping up everywhere in the cyberwold. Black hats and unethical practitioners are to blame for the appearance of the improved algorithms and disavow tool. In some ways, their measure is rational, because all they are trying to do is remove the sites which try to manipulate results, and offer a better experience to users. The only problem is that good sites might get hurt in the process. Yet again, this is a questionable matter, and there are a lot of contrasting opinions. Many specialists say that if your site is made up of many bad links, it will eventually loose rankings.

The prospect of manually removing hundreds or even thousands of links doesn't sound good. Luckily, professionals will be relieved to hear that the Webmaster tools and data supplied by it will suffice in order to „clean” the page. The marketing agencies advise clients to use the disavow tool. However, if you are listed on both „site frequently disavowed” and „sites with links frequently removed” lists, you should ignore the removal requests, and focus your resources on improving the site. There are two types of messages you might receive.

• One concerning manual penalty of unnatural links

• the other one regarding algorithmic anchor text based penalties.

If you receive both messages it means that your problem is algorithmic. As such you will need to further investigate the problem. Disavowing bad links will alleviate the issues, but you will also have to concentrate on creating better backlings to your website.

In conclusion, your course of action should look something like this:

• classify your links and carry out a link audit

• remove negative anchor texts

• disavow spam links

• send a reconsideration request to Google

• Wait for a reply and recover your rankings

A word of advice for all the „smart guys” out there: try to grow your business with the help of ethical outreach and marketing strategies if you want long term results.