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Why should I disavow?
In the past, the quantity of backlinks was the most important factor: The more backlinks a website could get, the better. As a result, SEO practices and business ideas developed for a short time that today would be described as "blackhat" SEO. Link farms offered (and still offer) thousands of links with one click - for money, of course. It can be assumed that "old" sites that were already doing SEO years ago also used these practices to increase their backlink count.
However, in addition to these questionable methods of backlink building, entries in various directories, for example, also have a negative effect today. In principle, directories are not bad and in some cases even extremely useful. But you should ask yourself with every entry: Would I choose this directory to search for entries there? Also check which other pages are linked there.
Of course, Google and other search engines are not unaware of what SEOs around the world are trying to do to manipulate rankings. The development of algorithms should also take this massive and unnatural link building into account. This was most recently noticeable with the first Penguin update, when many websites suddenly lost a lot of visibility because "bought" backlinks became a negative SEO factor.
Another reason for disavow is that some websites are affected by"negative SEO": Competitors engage in massive link building to competitor sites in order to "shoot down" their domain. This is not necessarily illegal, but it damages the backlink profile enormously. To counteract this, website operators can disavow such backlinks. This tells Google that the search engine should ignore these links. After Google has crawled all links again (which can sometimes take a long time), the backlink profile often recovers and visibility increases again.
How can I disavow?
You should first check your backlink profile. This can be done using the free Google Search Console, where you can find out which pages link to yours. To do this, go to → Search queries → Links to your website in the Search Console. An alternative is the "Screaming frog" tool. You can have up to 500 URLs analyzed free of charge. An upgrade costs £99 per year. Finally, Linkresearchtools offers the DTOX tool, which checks all backlinks to your site and immediately provides a risk assessment for each backlink.
Once you have a list of backlinks, you can go through them one by one and check them manually:
- The link is set voluntarily.
- Other links on the page lead to trustworthy pages.
- The link adds value.
- The link source is trustworthy.
If you can answer all these questions with "yes", it is a "good" backlink for the time being. You should disavow all other "bad" backlinks. Google offers to upload"disavow files" in the Search Console. This file must be a .txt file. It contains all domains from which bad backlinks point to your own website.
Such a file can look like this:
The comment in the first line is for the creator himself. Further comments can also be added, but it is unlikely that any Google employee will read them. The "domain:" command tells Google that all links in the domain should be disavowed. This would also work at URL level, but some backlinks would not be disavowed.
What happens after the disavow?
Nobody can force Google or bing to do anything. It can sometimes take months to see an effect on visibility. In addition to waiting, Linkresearchtools, for example, offers the"DTOX Boost" tool to speed up the process. However, the tool is quite expensive and therefore less attractive for individuals.
Unfortunately, disavowing once is not enough. You need to regularly check your backlink profile and disavow bad links.
arocom can help
If you do not regularly monitor your backlink profile yourself, identify bad links and disavow them if necessary, our disavow service can certainly help you. Get in touch with us.
