Low-quality backlinks and spam backlinks are factors that can attract Google’s attention and potentially penalize your website. To minimize this problem, the Disavow Link tool is the most effective option for removing bad backlinks and retaining quality backlinks. However, for those who are new to SEO, understanding Disavow Links and how to Disavow a specific URL or domain can be difficult. In today’s article, Optimal Agency will help you answer the question What is Disavow Link?, how to detect bad backlinks and guide you on How to Disavow Bad Backlinks for your website.
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What is Disavow Link?
Disavow Link is an important tool that helps you disavow backlinks from untrustworthy or suspicious sources pointing to your website. When using the Disavow Link tool, you can officially notify Google that you want to remove the low-quality or unwanted links your website receives. This is useful for protecting your website from bad practices by competitors, or to avoid being penalized by Google’s algorithms for the presence of bad backlinks. Specifically, when you discover that your website is receiving links from untrustworthy websites, spammy websites, or links that may harm your reputation, you can use the Disavow Link tool to ask Google to ignore these links when evaluating and ranking your website. In this way, you minimize the risk of being negatively affected by low-quality links, while protecting your website’s rankings and presence in Google’s search results.
The role of Disavow Link is important
Disavow Link is an important tool that helps website administrators protect their sites from penalties from Google when assigned low-quality backlinks. In today’s context, many websites are experiencing a serious drop in traffic due to being penalized by Google for bad links. This situation does not only happen to low-quality websites but even professionally invested websites cannot completely avoid it. When links pointing to the website are not checked and managed regularly, bad backlinks can accumulate and cause serious consequences such as loss of indexation, brand keywords, and a negative impact on the website’s reputation. Disavow Link becomes an effective solution to remove bad backlinks from the website. Here are the main reasons why individuals and businesses need to use this tool:
- Improve website ranking: Disavow Link helps improve website ranking by removing links that can reduce the reputation and quality of the page. The website can restore its credibility and improve its position in search results by cleaning up its link profile.
- Limit Google Penalties: This tool helps avoid unwanted penalties from Google, especially from the Google Penguin algorithm, by removing unnatural, low-quality, or spammy links from competitors. By sending a request to Google to ignore these links, you can protect your website from negative impacts.
- Remove unwanted links: Disavow Link allows you to send a request to Google to review and remove unwanted links. This helps restore the status of the website after being affected by low-quality backlinks and restores the site’s trustworthiness and performance in search.
Using Disavow Link not only helps protect the website from penalties but also helps improve search rankings and restore the website’s reputation.
Readers, please learn more about other articles like How to place backlinks effectively.
How to detect bad backlinks?
Detecting bad backlinks on a website is an important first step in the process of managing links and protecting the website from Google penalties. This can be complicated and requires a lot of experience from SEO experts. To help you filter out low-quality backlinks more easily, IMTA will guide you through the most popular and effective tools.
Ahrefs can filter low-quality backlinks
Ahrefs is a powerful and popular SEO tool that helps you analyze and filter your website’s backlinks. First, you need to log in to your Ahrefs account and go to the backlink analysis section. Ahrefs provides detailed information about the number of backlinks, the pages with backlinks pointing to your website, as well as a graph showing the increase and decrease of links.
One of the outstanding features of Ahrefs is the ability to look up competitors’ backlinks, helping you compare and evaluate the quality of links. With metrics like link count and quality, Ahrefs is a great tool to filter out bad backlinks and remove them.
Use SEMRush to find bad backlinks
SEMrush is another popular SEO tool with more useful features and a more reasonable price than Ahrefs. To get started, select “Backlink Audit Tool” from the left sidebar and then select “Create new Project” to create a new project.
Fill in your website URL in the required box and name your project. If you manage multiple projects, choose a memorable name for easy management. Then, select “Start Backlink Audit”. SEMrush will take a few minutes to scan all the backlinks on your website.
Once the scan is complete, you can view and analyze the backlinks based on metrics like DA (Domain Authority), DR (Domain Rating), toxic score, anchor text, and more. You can export the data to a TXT file by selecting “Export to TXT” and adding it to the Remove list before using the Disavow tool.
Refer to using Google Search Console
The first step is to access the Google Search Console page and select the correct website you want to analyze. Next, you go to the left sidebar and select the “Links” section. In this section, you will see the “More” option located under the “Top Linking Sites” section.
Here, you need to export the link file by clicking on “Export External Links”. This file will contain information about the domains linking to your website. Next, you need to filter out which domains may be spam and are pointing bad links to your site. This is an important step to identify links that may be harmful to your SEO.
How to Disavow Bad Backlinks
To disavow unwanted links to your website, you need to follow these steps to ensure the process is done correctly and effectively. Here are the detailed step-by-step instructions:
Step 1: Create a .txt File Containing the Domains or Links You Want to Disavow
First, you need to prepare a .txt file containing a list of domains or links that you want to disavow. This is an important step to ensure that the list of bad backlinks is clearly defined and accurate.
- Disavow Links: If you only want to disavow backlinks from a specific page and not the entire website, you need to use the following syntax in the .txt file: http://abc.com/a.html. This allows you to disavow links from that page only but does not affect the entire domain.
- Disavow domain: If you want to disavow all backlinks from a specific domain, you use the syntax: domain:abc.com. This will disavow all links from that entire website, not just a specific page.
Ensure that the list of bad backlinks you want to disavow does not contain any errors. This is important to avoid disavowing links that may be valuable or affect your SEO in an unwanted way.
Step 2: Access Google Search Console
Next, you need to log in to Google Search Console using the email address you used to register your account. This is the first step for you to have access to Google’s Disavow Links tool.
Step 3: Access Website Disavow Links
After logging in to Google Search Console, you access Google’s Disavow Links tool page at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main. On this page, select the website you want to disavow the link for.
Step 4: Start Disavowing Links
After selecting the website, you will be redirected to the page to implement the link disavow. Here, click on the “Disavow” link to start the process of disavowing unwanted links. Be sure to follow the instructions and notes from Google to ensure the process goes smoothly.
Step 5: Complete the Disavow Links
Finally, you need to upload the .txt file you created in step 1. Click on “Choose File” and select the .txt file from your computer. Once uploaded, click on the “Submit” button to complete the process. Finish by pressing the “Finish” button to confirm and send the link disavow request.
Troubleshooting Common Errors
During the disavow process, you may encounter several errors that prevent you from uploading your file, such as:
- Incorrect file format: Make sure your file is saved in .txt format.
- Incorrect syntax: Double-check the syntax in your .txt file to ensure it complies with Google’s guidelines.
- Insufficient access: Ensure you have administrative rights to your site on Google Search Console.
Disavowing bad links to your site can significantly improve your search rankings, especially if you’re facing manual actions from Google. When you remove unwanted links, you may see a noticeable improvement in your site’s rankings. However, keep in mind that Google’s disavow tool should only be used as a last resort. Try to remove bad links manually before resorting to the disavow tool. Hopefully, you understand why and when to disavow bad links, as well as how to handle manual actions. Good luck!
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Frequently Asked Questions
When disavowing bad backlinks, there are some important notes that you need to pay attention to to ensure effectiveness and avoid unwanted risks. First, always check and confirm that the list of links to disavow does not contain any legitimate links, as disavowing legitimate links can negatively affect your SEO. Second, only use the disavow tool when other measures such as contacting the webmaster of the linking pages have failed. Finally, monitor the results after submitting the disavow file and regularly check to ensure that no new bad links appear. This helps maintain the health of the website and sustainably improve search rankings.
You should use the Disavow Links tool when you have serious problems with low-quality or spammy backlinks. This is especially necessary when you have tried to remove bad links manually without getting the desired results, or when you have been hit by a manual penalty from Google. The Disavow Links tool is a last resort to tell Google that you do not want those links to count towards your site’s rating, helping to protect your reputation and improve your search rankings. However, before using this tool, ensure you have taken the necessary steps to manually remove bad links.
