Mountain View, California — At the PubCon conference in Las Vegas today, Google has finally launched a new and long-awaited “Disavow Links” tool, allowing webmasters dump links into their site that are hurting search rankings. Though Google warns: Use with care.
Matt Cutts, the eminent head of webspam at Google, announced the new Google Webmaster Tools feature feature, which you can try out for yourself over here, while urging all SEOs and webmasters to proceed with extreme caution.
It however, does not look like much, but its description suggests it has potential: In fact, it is a way for search engines and webmasters to search and destroy spam sites.
Incoming links to your website from a spam site can have disastrous effects on your ranking with the Google Supremo. So, if you believe your site’s ranking is being effectively harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.
But Cutts reiterated saying, “Most people should not need to use this,” said Cutts. “We build our algorithms such that in most cases we handle things just fine. It is also an advanced tool, so be careful.”
As a matter of fact, this is generally only something you would apply if you have received a notification about manual spam action taken due to spam links directing folks to your site. Besides, this new Webmaster Tool is designed for websites that has already been notified by Google that your site is linked to through paid links or other nefarious, spammy means and schemes.
Admittedly, these have most likely come from people either deliberately or accidentally hiring bad SEO firms that try and game Google’s search ranking systems. Thus, you can then upload a file of the bad links to Google for the remission of SEO sins.
Here is our distinguished Cutts, who is like, a level 19 battle sorcerer when it comes to spam-fighting, explaining more about the disavow links tool: As a first course of action, Cutts recommends contacting these sites to get the links removed manually. But with the new tool, a simple text file can be used to ask Google to ignore the link to a specific site, and any related domains as well.
The tool is live and can be found here. It has been beta tested by some selected SEOs already for the past few weeks. And the format is pretty effortless. All you need is a plain text file with one URL per line. An excerpt of a valid file might look like the following:
# Contacted owner of spamdomain1.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:spamdomain1.com
# Owner of spamdomain2.com removed most links, but missed these
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentA.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentB.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentC.html
The company explained the process via the example above: Lines that begin with a pound sign (#) are considered comments and Google ignores them. The “domain:” keyword indicates that you would like to disavow links from all pages on a particular site (in this case, “spamdomain1.com”).
However, the company currently support one disavowal file per site and the file is shared among site owners in Webmaster Tools. If you want to update the file, you will need to download the existing file, modify it, and upload the new one. The file size limit is 2MB.
In a typical Google fashion, below is a YouTube video that describes in detail how the tool works:
{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”} http://www.youtube.com/embed/393nmCYFRtA {/iframe}
Lastly, Google will of course take its own time to review submissions from site masters. Eventually, it can also completely ignore requests if it feels there’s a reason not to trust them. For more information, head over to Google’s Webmaster Tools help page.