Have you used Google's disavow tool? You might want to. If you have been actively involved in SEO for your website over the last few years, there is a good chance that you have unnatural links pointing to your site. These can hurt you in the eyes of Google's Penguin algorithm. Or, in some cases they can even get you a manual unnatural links penalty.
In this article we will talk about some very practical things that will help you when using the disavow tool. These tips should help you whether you are an experienced SEO or a small business owner who is trying to clean up a few unnatural links.
What is the disavow tool?
Introduced in October of 2012, the disavow tool is Google's way of allowing you to ask Google not to count certain links that point to your site. You can find the tool here. And here is Google's documentation on how to use the tool.
The scariest part of this documentation is this:
Using the disavow tool incorrectly can hurt you. You should only be disavowing links that you know were made with the intention of manipulating Google's results. Many articles have been written to help site owners decide which links are unnatural. But, there are not many articles written that take you through the process of auditing and disavowing your links from start to finish.
My hope is that this article will help answer any questions you have about using Google's disavow tool. If there is something that I haven't covered, then leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer.
Creating an audit spreadsheet
There are many services out there that can give you a list of your links. Some of these are great resources for organizing your links into a manageable format. I'm not a fan of services that try to audit your links for you as I believe that manually reviewing each link is necessary. But, some of these tools may be useful when it comes to putting a link auditing spreadsheet together. This Moz post contains a good review of many of the tools that are out there.
If you would like to create your own list of backlinks rather than using a tool or a program, then here is what I would recommend:
First, download your links from all available sources
You will want to start by downloading your links from Webmaster Tools. When you go to Search Traffic --> Links to your site --> More, you'll see this:
Download both the sample links and the latest links.
Disavow Tip: If you have a site that has more than 1,000 linking domains, sometimes you can get more links from Webmaster Tools by downloading the sample list of links daily for a few days.
I would also recommend downloading links from the following sources:
- majestic.com - Majestic has an option where you can get your links for free if you follow steps to verify your site. It's definitely worth it.
- opensiteexplorer.org - This is Moz's tool. It won't give you as many links as Majestic, but occasionally you can find some links in there that are not in the other sources.
- ahrefs.com - This is a paid option. In my opinion, it is worth the money. I will often get links reported in ahrefs that are not found in any of the other sources.
Combine the links into one big spreadsheet
As you get your spreadsheet from each source, find the column that contains the url of the sites linking to you. Copy this entire column into a new spreadsheet. You can do this in Excel or in Google Docs. In the last year or so, Google Docs has gotten much better at handling large amounts of data. As such, the directions I'm going to give in this tutorial are for use in Google Docs as not everyone may have access to Excel. If you have a Google login or a Gmail account you have access to Google Docs.
You'll end up with a big spreadsheet containing every link reported by each of the tools. At this point, this spreadsheet will contain a lot of duplication, but don't worry, we will deal with this soon.
(Note: It's not a bad idea to also include other columns that may help you with your audit such as the anchor text or nofollowed status, but for the sake of simplicity in this tutorial, we will just include the urls.)
Break these urls down to the subdomain level
Create a new column to the left of your urls. At the top type in the following formula:
=left(B1,find("/",B1,9)-1)
Then, highlight column A and press CTRL-D. This will fill the formula down the column and you will end up with something that looks like this:
Now, highlight column A and we'll ask the spreadsheet to convert the formula results to values. You need to do this in order to be able to copy and paste in this column. To do this, do CTRL-C to copy and then select Edit --> Paste Special --> Paste Values Only.
Now we're going to use the Find and Replace feature to break these down to the subdomain level. Keep column A highlighted and click Edit --> Find and Replace, and type in https://. Leave the replace field blank and press "Replace All".
Now do the same thing for the following phrases:
https://
www.
Don't forget the period after "www."!
Once this is complete, then column A contains the domains/subdomains of each url.
De-duplicate so you just have one link from each domain
Now what we are going to to is dedupe this list so that we just have one link from each domain. Most spreadsheets have a dedupe function built in. However, I have found that when you are dealing with a large number of rows, this will often crash the spreadsheet, so what I do is first, sort column A using alphabetical order, and then create a new column to the left of my domains and add the following formula:
=if(B1=B2,"duplicate","unique")
Copy this down so that the spreadsheet will now show you which entries are duplicates. You can then filter this column to show only the duplicates and delete each of these rows.
What you will be left with is one url from each domain linking to you.
Audit!
Now you need to visit each url on your spreadsheet and make a decision on whether or not you should keep links from this domain or disavow. On your spreadsheet, mark each url as either "disavow" or "keep":
In some cases, I'll mark some links as "debatable" and then review them again once I have seen all of the links in a link profile. Sometimes there are patterns of unnatural linking that only become visible after reviewing a good portion of the backlinks.
Here are the questions that I would ask when looking at each link:
- Was this link made solely for SEO purposes?
- Does this link truly, honestly have the possibility of directing clients your way?
- Would you be worried if a Google employee or a competitor saw this link?
Disavow tip: When Google penalizes a site, or affects it algorithmically because of unnatural links, their goal is to demote sites who have been actively cheating. Every site has weird looking links that make you think, "Where the heck did that come from?" But there is no need to go disavowing everything that you don't recognize. Penguin will not affect a site just because it has some odd looking links.
If you're having a hard time deciding which links to disavow, then here are some resources that give more advice on how to make disavow decisions:
- Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation
- What is an Unnatural Link? An in-depth Look at the Google Quality Guidelines
- Is That Directory Link Unnatural?
After reading those, if you are still unsure about the majority of your links and whether or not they should be disavowed, then it may be best to hire someone who is experienced in disavow work to do this audit for you.
Making your disavow file
Add "domain:" in front of the domains
Once you have finished assessing each link, you'll want to filter your disavow column so that you just see the links that you have decided to disavow.
Then, create a new sheet on your spreadsheet, copy your domains column and paste it into this new sheet:
Now we're going to add "domain:" in front of each domain name.
Disavow tip: You ALWAYS want to disavow on the domain level. If you disavow on the url level, you run a very high risk of missing bad links. For example, if you are disavowing a link on https://www.example.com/article.html, that same link may also exist on https://www.example.com/articles/ and https://www.example.com/tag/links, and https://www.example.com/article.html?utm=fb and so on.
To add "domain:" in front of each domain name, type the following formula into B1:
="domain:"&A1
Copy this formula down the entire column. Then, as before, do a copy and then paste special --> paste as values.
Now you've got your disavow directives in column B:
Make a text file
Your disavow file has to be a .txt file in UTF-8 format or 7-bit ASCII. There are a few ways that you can do this. On my Mac, what I do is open TextEdit, copy and paste my "domain:example.com" column (column B), and then click "Format" --> "Make plain text". I then save this as a .txt file.
Another option that works well is to create a new Google Doc document, copy the disavow directives into this document and then click "File" --> "Download As" --> "Plain text".
Disavow tip: There are many other ways to make a .txt file. But sometimes these files create odd characters that can throw errors when you file the file. If you are getting odd errors once you file, then try creating your text file using the Google Doc method mentioned above. This seems to be the most reliable way to produce a text file that Google won't reject.
What about comments?
I have seen disavow files that look like this:
You can leave a comment in your disavow file by starting a line with a "#". However, no Google employee will look at your disavow file. It is completely machine processed. Comments are there just for your own use. I will insert comments where it might be useful for me when I'm editing the disavow file in the future. For example, I might say the following:
#The following links were disavowed on December 16, 2014. These links are ones that we know are low quality directory links.
Filing your disavow
To file your disavow file, go to the disavow tool, and select your site from the dropdown list.
Click "disavow links" and then "disavow links" again and then "choose file". This is where you will upload the .txt file that we just created.
If you've been successful, then you'll see something that looks like this:
But, you may find that you have errors:
Common errors
Here are some things to look for if you have an error message:
- If you have typed "domain:https://www.example.com", you need to remove the https://www.
- Sometimes the backlink tools will give you domains with odd characters in them that the disavow tool doesn't like. For example, sometimes ahrefs.com will give me domains that look like this:
| _¼_¡_á_ü_____ü__„â_µ„Û___µ„â.„Û„ã.com |
If I try to disavow domain:_¼_¡_á_ü_____ü__„â_µ„Û___µ„â.„Û„ã.com, that's going to throw errors. These domains never resolve. I just delete them from my disavow.
- Look for domains with ports attached. For example, you may see domain:example.com:8080 on your list. Just remove the :8080. A colon will cause your disavow to throw an error.
As mentioned above, if you are getting errors and you can't figure out why, try formatting your file with a Google Doc and saving as a .txt. This usually works for me.
Modifying your disavow file
If you have unnatural links, then it is a really good idea to do regular checks of your backlinks. I have several clients for which I do monthly backlink audits and even though they are not currently building links, each month I will see a good number of new unnatural links. Many of these are old links from as early as 2006 that are just surfacing now. Some are new spammy links that perhaps are the result of previous automated processes that continue to propagate. And some may even be attempts at negative SEO. My point is that most sites that I have seen that needed to have disavow work done will need to continually update their disavow file.
Disavow tip: When you upload a new disavow file, you are COMPLETELY REWRITING your old file. If your old file has 300 domains in it and you want to add 30 new domains, your new file will have 330 domains in it.
In order to update your disavow file, you'll need to go to the disavow tool, select your site, select "disavow links" and again, "disavow links" and "download". I have no idea why, but Google will give you your file in the form of a .csv and not a .txt file. What I do next is copy column A and paste it in either TextEdit (on a Mac) or into a Google Doc. You can then add your new links and save the file as a .txt and file it as before.
When does the disavow start to work?
As soon as you upload your disavow file, Google will start to apply the disavow directives to each link of yours as they crawl the web. Let's say that I have a link on
https://www.spammysite.com/article.html
and I have disavowed
domain:spammysite.com
The next time that Google crawls https://www.spammysite.com/article.html, or any other page on this domain that links to you, they will apply an invisible nofollow tag to each link that points to your site. This means that these links will no longer be included in algorithmic calculations (i.e. Penguin) for your site. If your site is affected by the Penguin algorithm, you will not likely see changes right away. You will need to wait until Google reruns the Penguin algorithm and regathers information about your links. Google has hinted that soon this will happen continuously rather than on a sporadic basis. Hopefully this will mean that sites will be able to escape Penguin quicker. You'll still need to wait for Google to recrawl all of the links on your disavow file though. John Mueller from Google has said that it can take up to a year for all of your links to get recrawled. However, in my experiments, the longest a link took to be disavowed was three months. Most links were disavowed within a month.
Should you be removing links as well as disavowing?
This is a subject that deserves its own article. In fact, I have written a full article about this here. In general, if there is a link that I control, and I know I can easily remove it, then removing it is the best option. But, if you are dealing with an algorithmic issue such as Penguin, in my opinion, there is no need to go on an exhaustive email campaign to ask site owners to remove links. These campaigns are expensive and depending on the niche, the success rate is often very low. If you have a manual penalty, however, then yes, you need to make attempts to remove every unnatural link.
Can you reavow a link?
What if you made a mistake and included domains in your disavow file that were actually good links? You can remove a disavow directive by modifying your disavow file so that it no longer contains that domain and then re-uploading it. However, Matt Cutts commented earlier in the year that it takes much longer to reavow a link than to disavow it. You would think that the next time it was crawled, Google would remove the invisible "nofollow", however, there is some type of lag time built in before the link starts to count again. The purpose of this is to make it harder for spammers to find ways to cheat the system.
Questions?
You need to be careful when using the disavow tool. But, this doesn't mean that the average webmaster cannot use it. If you know you have low quality links pointing to your site, then this tool can be a good way to ask Google to not to count these links against you. Still, I have found that in over two years of helping people use this tool, questions often arise. If you have questions I'll do my best to answer. Or, if you have used the disavow tool and have hints to add, I'd love to hear your comments!
Hi Marie,
Great idea to let people know about the pitfalls of using the Disavow Links Tool :)
For those who want to make the process of tracking and updating disavow files much easier, we created this free tool. It allows you to upload an existing disavow list, validate contents and save the file. On download, the most common mistakes are eliminated for you, producing the file in UTF-8 format and ensuring it is within the 2Mb file size limit required by the Disavow Links Tool. This makes it much easier if people are worried about making mistakes.
To update a disavow file, log in and upload the list of new domains. The tool will append the new list with date notation and the downloadable file is ready to submit.
We built this to help the many people who struggle with managing spreadsheets, reformatting files etc. and for those who are having to constantly update disavow files in response to negative SEO issues.
Hope it helps,
Sha
Thanks Sha. That tool looks super helpful. I have one that does things like this that I use internally but it's not polished enough to let others use it. :) Hopefully yours can help some people. Formatting the file correctly is so important!
Hey Marie,
Have had a few questions about the way the tool handles upload of initial files, so to clarify:
If you upload a list of specific URLs it will strip out everything else and produce the domain level disavow list. If your upload includes mulitple URLs for the same domain, all duplicates will also be removed.
We hadn't seen the problem you mentioned with ahrefs causing an issue to date, so can only assume people are probably seeing this and dealing with them before they upload to disdit, but our techs are now working on notifications for anyone who includes characters that are not part of the UTF-8 character set. Thanks for pointing it out :)
I agree.
When I Disavow a domain, will it change my Moz PA and DA? As Well as my Majestic TF and CF? Or will it not change until the link is completely erased?
When you use Google's disavow tool, no one outside of Google knows which links you have disavowed. As such, disavowing links will not have any effect on the metrics measured by tools like Moz and Majestic.
Marie,
Admittedly I'm still reading, but wanted to jump down to the comments before I forgot: I'm SO GLAD you've been crystal clear about two things:
It seems like beginner basics, but from what I've seen, too many SEOs don't go about the process in that manner.
This is great article that covers almost all of issues with Disavow tool. However this tool is too powerful and if it's used incorrect can cause much more damage than original penalty. That's why should be used with extreme care. Also link audit should be do scheduled basis to disavow bad links even before hit site.
I still think that isn't bad in WMT to have some kind as notification in site messages like "penalty due content" or "penalty due links". Sometime even sites was hit with multiple penalties and recovering is slow (and expensive !!!) procedure.
Google don't clarifying what penalty is, so webmasters guess.
Marie
Credit where credit is due, that is one of the best blog posts on Moz, certainly one of the most comprehensive. I have a question, do you think that you would get penalised if say you had about 60 inbound links, some of them were spammy, some not. I have a site where the client thinks that they are getting penalised but they have well over a thousand pages of thin or duplicate content but not that many inbound links and there is no manual action notice against them! I am more of the opinion that the duplicate and thin content is the issue but then all of their competitors are in the same boat because it is product based!
Wow, thanks for the kind words Ed.
I have definitely seen sites get a manual penalty or be affected by Penguin with only a few unnatural links. A lot of people will tell you that Penguin only causes a drastic insane drop, but I am quite certain that it can cause a site to drop just a few places.
In your client's case though it's hard to say what the problem is. If you can pinpoint the date of the drop to the date of a known algorithm change then this will help. But you're right...it does sound like it could be a Panda issue. I see a lot of sites that are desperately trying to clean up their backlinks when really, backlinks are not the problem.
I am totally agreed with you, i done the some thing for my websites and the result was not 100% after the update of penguin 3.0 but when there was another penguin refresh on December 6, 2014 the all websites coming back on rank. So it means if you will go ahead according to Google's algorithms guidelines then sure you will get result for that. Apart from this there are numbers of things to notice while you are sending disavow list.
But you have solved this problem nicely in this blog how to create disavow list for get best result in ranking.
Great tutorial Marie!! Congratulations! These posts are the reason because i love moz. If any time i need fix backlinks, i will use this guide for do it.
Excel formula to add "domain:" save me a lot of time, thanks for sharing.
Whats wrong with a free business directory, gheesh?
Absolutely nothing as long as it is relevant, helpful (preferably content rich and with entries curated by the owner) has not been used by others as a vehicle for spam and has not obviously been created with the intent to spam or to sell opportunities to spam.
Intent is always the critical factor.
~Sha
Hi Mandy & PIXUS,
If all you need to do is generate the disavow file at domain level from your list, you can use our free disavow management tool, disdit. Just create a free account, then upload your list. rmoov will automatically create a domain level disavow file with correct formatting etc. Download the file ready for submission to the disavow tool. If you need to add more links at any time, just upload the new list and disdit will combine the lists, add notation to show when new domains were added and generate the new file for you.
Hope that helps,
Sha
That's a life-saver Sha, thank you so much! My 900+ line spreadsheet is now down to a 65 line disavow file. Took a nano-second!
Glad we could help Mandy,
All the best with your recovery :)
Great article Marie! Really it's a great guide for the beginners to use disavow tool. Instead of contacting scrapper it's easy to remove the bad back links by using disavow tool.
I have a question. You said that once Google process this file it makes the bad links no-follow automatically. After that, Should we remove this file once Google processed this file(When all bad links become no-follow)? or there is no need to remove this file?
Hi Deepanshu,
No! You absolutely should not remove the disavow file unless you want to re-avow all of those domains. The result would be that any manual action and/or algorithmic (Penguin) effect would return.
Matt Cutts told us this earlier this year. You can watch the video here.
Hope that helps,
Sha
I'm in agreement with Sha. You never want to remove a disavow once filed unless you realize that you have made a mistake and disavowed domains that actually contained good links. If you remove the file then at some point in the future Google will start counting those links again and you're at risk for getting hit by the Penguin algorithm in the future.
Thanks Marie Haynes and Sha Menz for the valuable information.
Good post Marie ! Its really hard to manage the links manually, i used all the steps for my back-links list of thousands links and Great to see all of them within 10 minute in a good Order.
I have been to countless workshops where they say that comments are necessary. I have tried to argue that I read that no human ever reads the comments but couldn't find the proof. So thank you!! And thanks for such a comprehensive guide to disavowing.
That scares me that people teaching workshops have such wrong information. Wow.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people with an eye for making money from workshops who have no real understanding or experience in the niche. A lot of myths and assumptions get translated as fact as a consequence *sigh*
@Marie Haynes
what should be the review cycle for disavowing backlinks? e.g if a site is getting 100s of un-natural backlinks every month and when site should update disavow file? every week or every month or after a quarter?
Thanks
Great question. The answer to this is going to vary from site to site. I have some sites for which I recommend monthly link audits. I would do this for sites where unnatural links keep pouring in each month, whether they are from old self made-automated processes or from attempts at negative SEO. Often, we'll do monthly backlink audits for a few months and then, when things start to cool down we'll switch to quarterly.
One thing I have found though is that many people think they are getting spammed with unnatural links but really they are just getting automated links from alexa scrapers, wikipedia scrapers and other sites. These are not links that are likely to harm you in the eyes of Penguin.
But, if you are seeing truly unnatural links at the rate of 100s each month, then monthly (or even twice monthly) link audits are a good idea.
One important part is to get rid of harmful links: those who come from poor sidewide pages or links.
Very carefully. The links remain one of the pillars of the positioning. That does not change. What changes (or rather is set) is the nature of those links. It may be the case that someone stop panicking and bundle to remove all links, causing an almost irreparable damage to your website. It is very important that cleaning is made links under professional supervision, or at least being quite sure what you are doing.
We must remember that penalties have been algorithmic Penguin 2.0, collar, which means that use complex tools like the Tool disavowal and send the page to Google for reconsideration will not help.
Step one...reconsider! This is a topic that I wish people would strongly consider before jumping into and 'doing'. More times than not I see people hurt their site for the long run while trying to crawl out of a penalty. Shaving off too much is just as bad as not shaving enough.
Hello Marie
In One of the my client websites I have done SEO since the one year, but keywords of that website are not able to reach at least top 20 Google SERP may be site is affected by google algorithm. Is disvaw tool can help that website to recover the google algorithm effect by removing irrelevant links which can be hurting site rankings?????
Hi Marie, very helpful post, thanks. Can I pick your brains? Having gone through your method, I have a 900+ list of domains to disavow (this particular site has been the victim of some crazy link generating - possibly a negative SEO attempt). Many of them are sub-domain cross-pollinations of different domains, all as bad as each other and many of which redirect to the same - ahem...adult content site, shall we say! E.g. amazing.spammydomain.com and amazing.crappydomain.com, then cheap.spammydomain and cheap.crappydomain etc. So I'd like to winnow my disavow list down to domain level only (to catch any future sub-domain variations that crop up). Is this a good idea? And rather than manually go through each of the 900 lines on my spreadsheet, is there a formula I can use to delete the sub-domain portion of the link? Thanks for any tips!
Am having same problem, bet it's the same site! I've got about 3000 of these, could do with a formula to get rid of the sub domains
Yay. I'm glad that Sha's tool worked well for you!
For future reference, this formula isn't perfect, but it will break subdomains down to domains assuming there is just one sub:
=mid(A1,(find(".",A1)+1),len(A1))
Best of luck!
That's really helpful Marie, thank you for being such a formula wizard! There are sometimes dozens of subs for each domain, but once I've applied your formula line by line, I can simply de-dupe that column again at domain level so there's just one definitive list of domains to carry out a manual check.
Nice! Glad that the formula helped.
I disagree a bit here, first of all Google does not start disavowing links after you upload your disavow file. Usually the major data refreshes take things like this into account and links are finally ignored at the end of that update. Maintaining disavow file is a good practice if you find spammy links to your site that cannot be removed but maintaining the file wont stop those link hurting your site until the major refresh takes place.
I'm always up for a little bit of debate. :)
In this video, John Mueller from Google says, "The next time we crawl the urls in your disavow file, we'll drop the links from those pages to your site." https://youtu.be/AdzlHxRJpak?t=25m18s (25:18). He has said this in other places too.
However, you're right in saying that you may not see the effects of disavowing right away. If your site is affected by Penguin, then you have to wait until Google regathers Penguin data about the trust of your links and then reruns the algorithm. Google has hinted that it may be running continuously now. But, they didn't say whether they are continuously gathering data about your link cleanup efforts or not.
They might be changing things, but in most of the scenarios with my clients I have observed this thing during this whole year. Let's see what have the gotten for us now :)
Thank you Marie, Great walkthrough!
One thing that some people might want to consider is having a whitelist and blacklist ready where all the good or bad links are stored for future reference. You could save the lists into two different spreadsheets with all the raw URLs listed (in the original format) and then comparing and deleting these URLs by finding duplicates values before the "Break these urls down to the subdomain level" step. It could help you save a lot of time. There are many sources on the internet with lots of whitelists and blacklists samples. Be aware that what might be a bad link to other could be a good link for you.
Also keep in mind that some backlinks might not be as good as others but the traffic they bring to your site would make that link a good prospect to whitelist or keep.
That's pretty similar to what I do. I have a blacklist/whitelist of about 15,000 domains that I always check against my link audit. I'll probably be opening up a tool shortly that will allow people to check domains against my blacklist.
Hi Marie, thanks for this. Having done penalty removals in the past, it is always good to have a full process at hand!
About the "all links have to be checked manually" idea, I agree since (in my opinion) no tool can be as good as humans eyes. Nevertheless, clients rarely have 6 months of their time to dedicate to a manual check, and often have thousands of links. Therefore, tools are needed.
I don't know what the community thinks but I reckon LinkDetox is pretty good at it. I came across LinkRisk, but never used it. Do you know if it is any good?
Thanks a lot
I think these tools can be good when combined with a manual review. I haven't personally used any of them though. I'm just a little cautious to recommend any at this point because I have seen a lot of cases where I site owner got an automated review and went to straight to disavow and either disavowed good links or missed a lot of bad links!
Hello! Thanks for the detailed information. I'm not sure if this comment will get a reply, since the post is now a few years old. However, I did have a question regarding which links should be considered for disavow.
I have a client who runs a type of online support community for bloggers. When a blogger becomes a member, they put an image on their blog to show they are a member of the community. However, many of these bloggers, while not spammy, are young blogs that have 0 Domain Trust and 0 Domain Citation. The links back to my clients site are causing her trust and citation to fall to very low levels. Again, these are not spam sites, they are legitimate bloggers who are building their brands, but many might take a long time to do so depending on their commitment.
Would Google consider these links "spammy" given their low trust and citation, or does Google use other factors to determine spammy-ness? Should my client consider disavowing these links that were given to her in good faith and as a practice of her blogging collective?
Thank you for any help!
Ron
Hi Ron,
I don't worry too much about things like Domain trust when I look at link quality. While we don't know exactly what factors Google looks at, what they are most concerned about are links that are made for SEO reasons.
These links sound like they *could* be good links but they also have the potential to be viewed as unnatural links. Are bloggers required to put this image/widget on the site in order to be members? Do they get any sort of kickback for doing so? If there is a requirement or an incentive to link back then these would be unnatural links (if they are followed links.)
Are the bloggers instructed on what anchor text to use? Or is the link in a widget that links back with a keyword anchor? If so, then I'd be worried about these links.
But, if the bloggers have been asked to link to the site and they do so on their own volition, and they are not keyword anchors, then these are likely good links regardless of Domain authority or Trust Flow and I wouldn't worry about Google treating them as unnatural.
Marie,
Thank you so much for the response. It was very helpful and fully answered my question. The bloggers are not required to add the link back to the site (which is actually a graphic that links back). They do so voluntarily, and are not compensated in any way. It seems I (hopefully) don't have to worry about a penalty.
Thanks again. This is why I love Moz :)
Ron
This is an excellent resource. As you mentioned, you need to be really careful with this tool. Disavowing the wrong links can do more harm than good. It's recommended to work with an experienced SEO when disavowing.
Many thanks for another very good post Marie! Have tweeted it.
I haven't got many spammy links pointing to my pr2 site, but there are a few.
Two questions;
1 Will using the disavow tool (providing I don't disavow good links) cause me any problems with Google? For example, will it act as a red flag that some spammy activity has been involved?
2 There is one spammy Candian directory that has 5 exact match anchor text links ("website design townx") pointing at my home page (I am a UK site) and it wants to charge me $20 per link to remove them. I saw your comment earlier that a few bad links can cause a site to drop a few places and now see in the serps that my site is position 8 for terms such as "web design townx" but is position 10-11 for "website design townx" (the exact match anchor text). Is it likely that this directory (and maybe a few other exact match links) could be causing this or is it more likely to be an onpage issue?
I know that a lot of people are fearful that using the tool will set off a red flag that says, "HEY GOOGLE! LOOK! I HAVE UNNATURAL LINKS!" John Mueller from Google has said that this is not the case. I don't have any fear in using the tool for any site.
Personally, I rarely pay for link removal. In your case I'd probably just disavow that domain and be done with it.
No one can say for sure whether just a few links can cause a site to drop in rankings as there are many factors, but if you know you have links like this (keyword anchored directory links) it's probably best to disavow them.
Many thanks Marie!
I struggle to determine what is a low quality link. I've got a mention on a recent article, however I received about 100+ backlinks to my site due to a sitewide side bar. Should I disavow all the links except for the original article url?
Thanks
Hi Stephen. The answer to this question depends on a few factors. I'm not so much worried about the fact that the link is sitewide as Google knows that this is not 100+ individual votes, but really, one site that is vouching for you. My main concern would be the intent behind these links. If you published an article and someone picked it up and mentioned it in their sidebar, that's totally fine. But, on the other hand if you said, "Hmmm....every time this site publishes an article, they link to it from their sidebar with a keyword anchored link. I should get an article published so that I get the SEO benefit," then that would be a different story.
The disavow tool is meant to be used by site owners who have been aggressively making their own unnatural links. It sounds like this is not the case for you.
Thanks for the super useful guide. Just went through it and used it on what I'm my sites, that has been spammed recently
Hi Marie,
Thank you for the great article.. I am not a professional SEO, but work as realtor in Canada, and have SEO as a hobby. Noticed changes in search results for my personal site, and a drop in trust flow and domain authority over the past couple of months. After reading your article and checking backlinks in Majestic, it appears someone is doing negative SEO against me. With the info in this article, for the first time ever, I was able to upload a disavow file. Wouldn't have had any idea on how to do it, without your help. Thank you so much!
There are apparently 18 related domains that are sending spammy links to my site, on a daily basis.
My question: now that Google has the disavow file, is there any way to repair my trust flow in Majestic? Or will this improve automatically over time? Also, my domain authority dropped a full 10 full points since the spammy links started. Is there a way to repair this in MOZ, or does everyone take their queue from Google?
Thanks for any help you can give this SEO beginner. I had no idea that there are people out there practising negative SEO, it's sobering to know...
Hi Randy,
The good news is that if you disavow these domains on the domain level, you don't need to worry if you keep getting links from them.
Metrics that Moz and Majestic use (i.e. DA, Trust Flow, etc.) don't take into account your disavow file as only Google has this information. I'm really not sure whether unnatural links can cause these values to decrease. That's actually a good question! But, even if unnatural links *did* cause a drop in these metrics, it shouldn't really matter to you. It might perhaps matter if you were selling links as people would naturally want links from a high DA site. But, for most people, what your scores are on these tools should not make a difference.
I do know that ahrefs has something built in where you can upload your disavow file and they'll take that into account. I'm not sure if that affects you're overall score though. It would be interesting to see if Moz and Majestic will do the same.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this. I'd like to ask, after you disavow a domain, will it still show in search console?
Also, has there been a case wherein disavowing low-quality links increase a page's traffic/ranking capability, assuming it hasn't been penalized yet?
Thanks!
Hi mannylogz,
Yes, links for domains that have been disavowed will still appear in search console. The link data in search console represents links that exist - disavowing them does not change this. The only way those links would no longer be seen would be in cases where they have actually ceased to exist. This might be because they have been removed or otherwise lost.
There are definitely instances where domains that do not have a manual action in place have improved in visibility when Penguin updated due to disavow instructions. Two important things to keep in mind here:
~Sha
Thanks Sha!
You're welcome :)
Happy to help anytime.
~Sha
Hi Mannylogz,
When you disavow a link, there really is no external evidence to show that it's disavowed. It will still show in Google Search Console's list of links and other backlink checkers.
Your second question is tough to answer with certainty. I am assuming by saying that a site is "not penalized yet" you are also saying that the site is not affected by the Penguin algorithm, right? In other words, can disavowing links help a site that is not currently under either a manual action or affected by Penguin?
Anecdotally, I would say yes. I have had several cases where we have disavowed links proactively (i.e. to avoid Penguin) and rankings improved within a few weeks. However, there's no way of knowing whether it was our disavow that did this or whether it was due to something else.
Thanks Marie!
Hi Marie,
I have a quick question... We're getting a LOT of links from spammy image directories, where they reproduce images from our site and make them clickable so they link to the larger image directly on our site. I suspect this is just spammy sites stealing images rather than negative SEO, but there are multiple new links every day and I'm concerned Google may misinterpret this as us link-building.
Would you disavow these?
Hi Simon,
I am seeing a lot more sites like this pop up lately in the link audits that I am doing. My gut instinct is that Google can recognize that these are not link that are made for SEO purposes. But still, when I see these I disavow just to be safe.
Now, for sites that have not been involved in any artificial link building of their own, I'd just ignore these links. But, if I'm already auditing the site and I come across a spammy image site I'll disavow them just to be on the careful side.
Hi Marie,
Thanks so much for the quick reply! Yes, the site was hit by Penguin due to artificial link building done many years ago. The site has been clean for a long time, plus now has a good natural link profile due to being continually featured in national press, media, etc. We've been aggressive with disavowing (~1000 domains) but obviously want to avoid disavowing unnecessarily.
So we'll disavow all these spammy image sites too.
Cheers!
I got several backlinks from same domain, there are more than 150000 links. If I manually write comments this will kill too many times. Is there any problem if I add same comments in every links?
We know we can add domain:example.com to remove all links from that domain. But i have to do that manually. This will kill huge time. so i added comments for every links like
# This is bad link https://example.com/1.html
# This is bad link https://example.com/2.html
# This is bad link https://example.com/3.html
My confusion is If i do so instead of domain:example.com , will google remove my bad links?
Thanks
Another amazing article to complete the negative SEO series (https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo). Thanks Marie :-)
Hi,
Firstly, fantastic article! Really helped me in the process of disavowing links to a highly spammed website!
We recently switched from .co.uk to .com due to the high number of spammy links which was penalising us in search.
We are now on page 2 with the .com site. Our idea to get closer to page 1 is to disavow all spammy links to the .co.uk site and then add a 301 redirect it to .com meaning the positive links, in theory, should boost our .com site.
I have uploaded the file to Webmasters disavow tool and have the "successfully uploaded file" message.
My question is how much risk is there involved in this redirect? I have disavowed all negative links but I need to be sure the disavow tool will take effect!
Thanks,
Charlie
Hi Charlie. This has the potential to be a risky move. My main concern with doing this is that it's rare that a site is able to disavow 100% of their spammy links. As such, I'm betting that there are still links pointing to the .co.uk site that are unnatural and have not yet been disavowed. The exception would be for sites that know exactly what unnatural links they have because all of them are purchased or self-controlled. But, if you have a site that was spammed to death then I would really be hesitant to redirect that site via a 301 and pass all of the link signals to the new site.
Are all of the spammy links pointing to the home page? I've seen some sites that had good links pointing to inner pages and I'm fairly certain that no Penguin issues would be passed if you redirect inner pages to their appropriate counterpart on the new site.
Are the two sites very similar? It may be that the .com is having trouble ranking because Google sees it as a duplicate of the .co.uk that is already established in the index. You could perhaps consider using some canonical tags to let Google know that the .com is the one that you want to rank.
Hi Marie,
Thank you again for the guide! This is the second month I have disavowed bad links, it was much easier and faster the second time :)
On one of our 2 sites: www.heritageprintingcharlotte.com I noticed a 33% drop in our visits the following week. Do you think the disavow was associated with the organic visit drop?
Thx,
Kevin
Marketing Manager
Heritage Printing
[email protected]
Hi Joseph,
A drop in rankings certainly can happen if you have disavowed some good links. But there can be many other factors as well.
This is way to complicatd.
Great post, thank you.
I have a lot of spammy links coming from .xyz domain extension and was wondering if there was a way to disavow backlinks by domain name extension.
Any idea how to achieve this?
Thanks!
I wish there was, but unfortunately there is no wildcard implementation in the disavow tool.
My gut instinct is that Google just ignores these .xyz spammy domains, but I can't say that for certain, so I do disavow them. Usually most .info, .biz and .com.br domains are quickly disavowed by me as well.
Those .xyz domains are a big part of my problem too. This month I'm noticing that a large number of these are ultimately redirecting to GoCompare.com (for anyone outside the UK, that's a very well known insurance comparison site).
I've just uploaded a file named disavow.txt, I've ensured it was in UTF-8 format, it contained 241 domains, all trimmed to the root with no www. or slashes, the message I get is:
"You successfully uploaded a disavow links file (disavow.txt) containing 0 domains and 241 URLs."
Any idea why all of the root domains are being accepted as URL's rather than domains?
Hi Carl. Did you put the word "domain:" in front of each one? It should look like this:
domain:example1.com
domain:example2.com
If that's not the answer, perhaps post a few lines from your file and I'll see if I can figure out what is happening.
SWEET fixed it, don't know how I missed that, thanks Marie
Here is a quick guide on how to get domain: before each domain URL if you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of domain links. https://techlightspeed.com/6419/using-the-google-disavow-tool.html
Hey Marie,
Thanks for the details! I just realized that our site was spammed with few spammy links and wanted to make sure what I was doing was correct.
Regards,
Hello Marie,
I have a doubt about disavow backlinks. Shall i add below backlinks to my disavow list,
1. 404 backlinks
2. expired domains backlinks
3.301 and 302 redirection backlink that doesn't have my website link
4. 404 backlinks from high DA and authority domains.
Thanks in advance.
There really isn't an all encompassing answer to these questions as it depends on a number of factors. If I'm doing a backlink audit on a site that has a large number of unnatural links, then I will often include 404 pages and expired domains in my disavow file just in case those sites or pages reappear in the future.
But, if I'm auditing a site with a good number of GOOD links then I have to make a decision on each of these 404s, 500s, 301s, etc. If the domain name is obviously a spammy one then I'll disavow. If I'm not sure then I may keep it.
I certainly don't rely on crawlers to look for 404 pages or nonexistent sites and exclude them from my audit. In my opinion, each of these links has to be evaluated manually and decisions made one by one.
Great post thanks. Disavow is crucial for getting rid of non relevant links. Joe at webservices talks about his often.
Such a great post. I have give approx half an hour to read your article, and i know this half an hour teach me a lot. thank you your time to write this awsome article
Thank you for the great guide!
One of my sites is being peppered with unwanted low quality links ( spam rating 4-5 / 17 ) from an otherwise trusted directory network. I have asked for a complete list of all such backlinks that seem to be part of an automated process being applied to the site, so that I can check each one.
I'm still waiting. If I do not get this information, I shall feel compelled to submit a disavow file. What impact, if any, does this have on the source creating these links?
Hi Marekant,
Google has said publicly that if you file a disavow it will not affect the site that you are disavowing. All it will do is stop Google from using those links in calculations for rankings. There are many people who have speculated that Google uses disavow data to teach machine learning algorithms about how to determine what .a good and bad link is. But, this has never been proven.
It sounds like it's a good idea to disavow these. There really is no harm in doing so.
Thanks Marie. It is not the source site that I will disavow, but specific backlinks from it. I appreciate your reassurance.
This guide reallt helped me. Thank you so much for sharing
Hello Marie Haynes,
Thanks for the detailed post.
I have a website, where I am getting 80,324 backlink (Links to your site) from an unknown IP address (204.11.0.xx)
and 4586 backlinks from myshopify.com
Should I disavow any of these domain?
Is it a good practice to disavow unknown IP address in general ?
While I have disavowed some IP addresses, if possible, it's best to sleuth out the actual domain and disavow that one. That said, however, I wouldn't disavow a domain just because I got a lot of links from it. The only domains I want to disavow are ones where I know there are SEO made links. The exception would be if I had a site that had loads and loads of unnatural links. In that case, I might disavow some domains blindly if I wasn't able to figure out where the links are. Every case is different though.
myshopify.com redirects to shopify.com. I would imagine that links from here are either nofollowed or natural, but would have to see the link to confirm.
Thanks for the information.
Just now submitted backlinks 53 links which came due to malware attack on my website.
Regards
Puikit Thakur
What is the right format of the link which we want to disallow? I mean format in text file which we need to upload in disallow tool.
Could be a good idea to include a website that we know that is harmfull before this one is linking to us ?
as a caution becouse is linking to other similar to our site ? thanks!
I have successfully uploaded disavow file and clicked on done. All process is gone well. What should i do now..
Regards
Rizwan
Need Help:-
I tried to rank one of my niche site and got panalised by google. While most of the links are from comments. But some sites don't have urls like (192.241.231.189/comment/9860).
How can I disvow this link, should I simply add in .txt file?
Hi there ashirwadrastogi, thanks for the comment! This blog post is a few years old now, and comments don't get a lot of visibility in general. I'd recommend asking your question in the Q&A forum instead, where it has a much better chance of being seen and responded to by experts in the community. :)
Hi. You can still disavow ip's like this:
domain:192.241.231.189
However, if there is an ip address with unnatural content, there's also likely another domain that is hosting this. I went to the url you mentioned and took content from that site and searched for it in quotes and came up with a couple of live urls that are hosting the same content so you'd want to disavow those too.
Here is more information on disavowing the ip:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-ip-209...
I have a question about backlinks that are pointing to non-existent pages. At one time, there was a hack and we inadvertently got two or three pages added to the site that we didn't even know about. Then, this company started linking tons of things to those two or three pages. All irrelevant. When we finally found it, we deleted the pages completely. So now they go to a 404 (page not found). Yet, when I run a backlink audit tool, the links still show up to the deleted pages.
Now I have read that these links won't hurt my site. But they made up about 90% of the backlinks we have. We have tried hard to contact the company, but I'm thinking the company either doesn't exist or ignoring me.
How is it that the audit tool still records these backlinks if the pages don't exist? Should I disavow these links?
Thank you!
Hi,
I would suspect that if you give it a few more weeks the backlink tools will recognize that those pages are gone. Regardless, if a link is pointing to a 404 (or 410) page it's considered a removed link and won't hurt the site in the eyes of Penguin.
There's more info here:https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2296653/removing-unnatural-links-by-removing-pages-on-your-website
Thanks very much for this. So when I get my backlinks from WMT they are not complete? If Google cannot index backlinks correctly then who can? Why would Ahrefs be better than Google? And also, so you need to constantly submit a cumulative disavow file, which could eventually be extremely long, or the bad links will come back? If it's applying a no-follow then why do you need to keep disavowing the same link? Aack!
Hi Torir,
It's not that ahrefs is better that Google, but the point is to gather links from several different sources so that you have the best chance of finding as many of them as possible.
If I had to choose to work with only one source, it would be GSC (WMT) links as they're the best representation of links that Google are seeing. But, I have done several manual penalty jobs where Google gave me example links that were not in the list of GSC links but were in ahrefs, majestic or OSE.
Yes, you do need to keep updating your disavow file in a cumulative way. When you upload a disavow it overwrites what is currently there. If your new disavow file left out links you had previously disavowed, then Google will eventually reavow them (i.e. remove the invisible nofollow).
very use full artical to resote your website rankingg
Hi Marie,
Thank you again! Yes, we disavow what's available from backlink checker tools as well as data provided by the SEO company, rather than one or the other. We submit disavow files monthly with any new domains added.
You've been very kind, so may I ask one more question? Firstly, when disavowing at the domain level and it's a pure domain rather than a subdomain, do you include a www version of the site too in the disavow file, e.g. domain:abc.com and domain:www.abc.com or just the former? Theoretically the former is fine, but different people have different views on this.
You'd want to disavow just the root version. So, domain:abc.com would also cover the www version of the site.
Hi Marie,
Thanks as always for the fast response!
A related question... Luckily, we do have this data. And only about 20% of the domains ever showed in ahrefs, majestic, GSC, etc so it's very useful. BUT... the link-building was done 3 - 5 years ago and so we're finding that about 95% of the bad links don't exist any more, either because the site has disappeared or the site has removed its bad pages. Presumably it's still important to disavow anyway, because even though the offending sites/pages have gone, Google might still lag on removing these from consideration or may still hold it against us? Whereas once it's disavowed, Google is more likely to consider it gone. Would you agree with this?
BTW it was me on today's Webmaster Hangout that instigated these discussions with John M, much of the chat before the Hangout went live. John's view seems to be that if a site has a really bad link profile, it's best to start again on a new domain. But at the same time he indicated that disavowing would also work, although the effort to find every site to disavow might be more than starting again. However, if the SEO company has provided the full list of domains, then presumably disavowing is the best option. Would you agree with this one?!
Simon
You're very welcome Simon.
There's definitely no harm in disavowing those unnatural links that are in reports but no longer live as you never know how many of them could resurface.
The discussion of whether or not to start over is a really tough one because if you create a new domain and use the same content Google will often attribute your old links to the new site. So, to start over, create a brand new site and brand new content can be costly. Plus, for many, their domains are highly branded, so scrapping their old domain name would not work.
I think that if you have a list of SEO made links and you disavow them all you're on the right track. I'd still want to do a link by link audit of what's available in all of the backlink checker tools as sometimes unnatural links can replicate. For example, you may have purchased a link in a spammy directory and then that directory owner may have created several other directories that are duplicates. (I think they do this to make money from people who will pay for link removal.)
I still recommend disavowing rather than starting over for most sites. However, we'll see if that is still my advice once Penguin refreshes. If we don't see a lot of recoveries then I might change my mind.
Hi Marie,
May I suggest another way to get an accurate set of links to disavow, other than just using tools like ahrefs, etc. It's kinda obvious, but often completely missed. Generally, 'bad' links are caused by link-building/exchanges by a questionable SEO company employed by the webmaster at some point in the past. Often, those SEO companies will have provided monthly reports on all the domains they've emailed and all the domains they've successfully built links from. It's really worth looking these up and disavowing pretty much all of them as they are by definition manipulative. Also, this approach can be far more thorough than relying purely on tools such as ahrefs, that will always miss a large proportion of domains. Would you agree with this?
Simon
Hi Simon,
I love it when I can get a list of SEO-made links from a previously hired SEO company. You're right - they are almost always ones we want to disavow. But, I've found that very few companies that I work with have this data. And, if you try to approach the company that made the links, they rarely cooperate.
Hi Maria,
I know you've posted this years ago, just wanted to say this is the best disavow resource out there. I have your post bookmarked and I refer to it religiously every time I put together a disavow file. From the excel tricks to pulling back link data, this is so fantastic. Penalties can really hurt a business, so thank you for all your help in lifting manual actions over the years! Kudos!
How can you know that our website has spammy links.How to download that spammy links Can we get any notification from GWT.
can you tell how to remove suggested keywords in the google?
Awesome guide. Just complete my disavow for my site. Thanks a lot for your guide.
[link removed by editor; comment links are nofollowed]
[Offending line not safe to be shown here.] !!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Thanks Marie Haynes ,
It's very nice to Find actually How should I go about Disavowing Links. I recently Found that my Competitor's are trying to paste my website links on foreign language sites and Porn sites. I was completely afraid that How this gonna be corrected. Finally Found your Article. I've heard of Disavow Tool but never Tried it or We can say I was afraid of Using it. But this article clearly explained how this needs to be done and there is no need to worry about if I do it Correctly. Thanks alot again. I've made my Disavow List and Successfully Submitted to Google. Cheer! Feeling Relaxed.
Hey Marie,
My site name https://fullmovies2day.com/ is suddenly dropped from google search. Would you like to check what's happened and why.is it happened for spam backlinks?? I am already sumitted for disavow backlinks but got no response from google.
Hi ThatsEnam! Just a heads-up—you may get more of a response if you post in our Q&A forum. You actually may find that your question has already been answered there. ;)
Hi. Do you have any manual actions when you go to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions in Google Search Console? I had a quick look and it looks like your site may just be aggregating other people's content. This can sometimes cause a Pure Spam penalty.
Very helpful, thanks! I'd better get cracking
This post is very help full & nice post & quick guide to Google Disavow Tools & Great Process of Google Disavow......Thanks A Lot Marie Haynes.....
There is one thing i do not understand, please enlighten me: Is there any problem (other than incorrect usage) of disavow tool? I know i have some spam sites linking to me, why should i not use disavow tool? or should i ? This is not clear in anywhere.
If you have been actively involved in creating links for your site then yes. If you haven't, then it's a tough call. This article may help:
https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
Every site I audit has odd links that might look like spam but really are just sites that link out to every site on the web. And then there are some that have spam links but there really isn't any reason as to why. For those sites, Google says they are good at ignoring the spam, but they do recommend disavowing just to be sure.
Hi Kubicon,
You are thinking in absolutely the right direction. The danger is in mistakenly disavowing sites that are not creating a problem for the site. You can certainly use the Disavow Links Tool to disassociate your site from any linking domain that you feel is undesirable. Just make sure that you look at the links yourself and make careful decisions about what you choose to disavow.
Hope that helps,
Sha
Thanks both of you for the answers. I was auditing a web site and an old SEO person made forum spams. I think it is ok to use disavow tool for this.
Its very nice article "Marie" Thanks to sharing this information about Google Disavow tool.
This is a great post Marie. Someone finally spelled it all out. With the use of Google Docs an added perk.
Two of the best Pro Tips...
You don't need to worry about comments in the text file as Google doesn't read it.
You don't need to do exhaustive email campaigns to remove links unless your website is under a manual penalty.
Great tutorial! Too bad Penguin isn't as dynamic as Panda!
It's getting there. Google has hinted that Penguin may be running continuously now.
Useful information shared.I am very happy to read this article about how Using Google's Disavow Tool. thanks for giving us nice info.Fantastic walk-through. I appreciate this post.Thanks.
Hello all! I have two questions regarding the disavow that I cannot seem to get any conclusive answers on. Hopefully some of you can share your thoughts:
1. In the disavow, should we include domains that are no longer online, nor are in Google's cache?
2. Should we include domains that removed our link from their site?
I realize the two above questions may seem stupid, however I have received conflicting recommendations from 'so-called' SEO experts and wanted to seek additional input prior to submitting my disavow. Personally, I am leaning toward removing these domains...
Many thanks for your input :)
Thanks, there seems complicated. I will try to use tool...
This blog post was so helpful! When my team encounters a large disavow we generally split up the different task to help with time. One person will gather the data, another checks the links, etc. Because of the that I have yet to see the entire process. Recently I came across a client who had been hit with a google penalty (related to peguin). The site has a total of 17 backlinks. This is a very strange situation. Generally the clients that receive a backlink penalty have hundreds if not thousands of links. I was wondering if other had experienced the same type of situation.
Does this site have a manual penalty? (i.e. if you go to Webmaster Tools --> Search Traffic --> Manual actions do you see a penalty? I have seen unnatural links penalties for sites with a small number of links. And sometimes those are really tough ones to clear. Sometimes the site can be a part of a blog network. Or, sometimes there are sites redirecting to this site that are penalized. Another possibility is that you can't see the backlinks in ahrefs and majestic and open site explorer because the links are from blog networks that have blocked those sites via robots.txt. And one other possibility is that the wrong version is registered in Webmaster Tools. For example, if you have the http version registered in WMT but your site mostly runs on https, then you may not see all of the links in WMT.
Hi Marie
This article was extremely comforting as have just gone through a process of removing poor and spammy links using the google disavow tool. I am not a SEO pro, and worked out the target links and the tool myself, and then held my breath. There is as usual conflicting advice out there, but I luckily by chance followed your approach. I have to say that there has been a noticeable ranking improvement in many of my key words and phrases. So I can for one confirm that what you are advising actually works, it was good to get your post event corroboration !! Many Thanks
Good job MarieHaynes, well describe but some I was disappointed from this tool. Not exactly work what describe here.
Thanks for the post! How would you know if this procedure was successful? I used a more simple (not the best) approach to disavow some links, but how do I know if this actually worked?
If you disavow bad links you can see improvements on search visibility in WMT with 100%, even 1000% or more overnight with algorithmic penalty.
For sites with manual penalty you need to clean up link profile and then to request review. If it's clean or natural will be revoked.
I think that this was explained best here After a Link-Based Penalty is Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase? in another article from same author.
That's a tough question to answer. The article that Peter linked to is a good place to start. But, the answer depends on what the problem was. If you were affected by Penguin, then, if you have been thorough you should see improvement the next time that Penguin runs. But there are a lot of variables when it comes to Penguin.
Marie, can I just say a big thanks for pointing out the dangers of this tool! I think this tool should shine advanced SEO warning: "Handle with Care"
This is far and away the best post that I've read to date on the issue of using the disavow tool correctly, huge thanks Marie.
Great post Marie! I have been using disavow tool to check bad links. A couple of points you need to consider here for sure. It's Google's take to decide which links they will disavow.
great share Marie. checked my website using disavow tools.
Thanks for sharing Marie Haynes. From experience, creating a disavow file can be a long and strenuous process...depending on how many bad links your client has accumulated over the years. The process gets even more fun when trying to contact other websites to remove a link.
Also, a little tip. You may come across a lot of websites that ask you to "pay to remove a link". I'm sure you already know this, but do not pay to remove a link. Disavow it...please! Don't contact them to remove it. Once they know you are "interested" you can count on them contacting you about paying for other link removals.
Many people take disavow tool in wrong way and they think that we can remove links directly from there without making effort to removing them manually. Many of them get wrong effect on their sites and they can’t understand that what is happening. Thanks for sharing this informative post.
Thank you Marie Haynes for this useful A to Z post specially useful for beginners. I have employed disavow for few of my sites. But i am still in contusion how google treats the file. Did google reallly read or justify the reason for disavowing the link? How they determine the effort given for removing the link physically. I have doubt.
I have disavowed nearly 220 domain or links for a site. From the list google disavowed or discouted nearly 45 links remaining are still showing in webmaster tool. But no significate raking change before the last pengin 3 roll out. After the first pengin roll out (from 17 oct 2014) I found my site out of 100 positon (which was on average 10 for its brand name). The situatin continued throgh 45 days. But suddenly it is appearing No 1 in SERP. I don’t’t know the reason behind it. This is reallya ghost activity. The backlink count ramins same, webmaster tool indicating 45 links removal.
My question is why they don’t disavowed other linsk. Are they quite good or no bad signal from those? Or they already disavowed but not reflecting in webmaster tool? If any one have answer please give me. I have to clear many doubt.
Hi Marie, great thorough post.
I have found it can be a real pain getting a near complete list of all the bad domains. If you have a client that has partaken in some industrial scale link building in the past it is worth asking if they can access a list of the sites their links were added to. Sometimes these 1000 links for 100 bucks schemes have system logins where you can download lists of all the great links your money got you. Can be very useful for finding domains/links that simply don't show up on most link reports!
Marie,
Love your article, things that really help require work! If it was easy, everyone could do it :)
QUESTION: Is there a "Spam Checker" for website/domain names?
AND: Do you disavow links that are offline?
Hi Joseph,
Moz has a new tool called spam score which can give you some kind of indication of whether a domain is likely to host spam or not:
https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to...
It's not 100% but it can be helpful.
Also, I personally have been creating a blacklist of domains over the years that I have personally disavowed. You can find that here:
https://www.mariehaynes.com/blacklist/
Really Helpfull GuideBut for making it a perfect guide you must add an example for disavowing just a url and not the whole domain.
Thanks
Good point. I think, however, that 99.9% of the time when people disavow on the url level they should not be doing so. I have seen it happen so often that people miss links when disavowing on the url level. I think that there are very few sites where you would say that a link on one page is a good one but on another page is an unnatural one. Still, it could happen. So, if you really, really wanted to disavow on the url level you simply put the url in your disavow like this:
https://www.example.com/spammyarticle.html
But, you have to be really certain that that link doesn't also come up on a category page or a /page/ page or a /comments/ page, etc.
Thanks Marie for this good post regarding disavow tool
Fantastic tutorial.
Thanks a bunch.
Hi Marie - If disavowed links still appear in WMT , then how do we know that those links have been disavowed by Google?
Unfortunately there is no way to verify that your links in your disavow file have been disavowed. However, if you see that the page which you disavowed has been cached by Google since the date on which you filed your disavow, you can assume that it has been done. More details here: https://www.hiswebmarketing.com/tell-link-disavowed/
Many thanks for your reply Marie.
Hey Marie, thanks a ton for this step by step guide to disavow links. I just Audit one of my site and add a disavow file in GWT using your tutorial. This is why MOZ is known as the ultimate resource for 'SEO'.
Thanks
~
Jerry
Is there a reputable company or site whom specializes in this kind of issue that you suggest, where someone will do this work for you that's not elance or oDesk. Sounds very time consuming for someone unfamiliar who does a lot of video marketing and tons of sites seem to link to these videos and when i go to find the link on the otherside its no were to be found.
Hi Dimarco,
If you're looking for someone to help with disavow work, that's what my company does. My goal in writing this guide was to help people who wanted to tackle the job themselves, but it can be time consuming and draining work. You can contact me via my Moz profile if you have questions.
Hey marie thanks for this detailed article . Earlier i didnt know how to properly upload the new file . i would put the bad links in file upload it and next time if i have some new bad links i again use to make new file and just upload it , didn't edit the old one .The same way i had been doing , means the only links would be disavowed which are in the last uploaded file as it was overwriting the previous ones.
now i dont have those old files which had different bad links each.Is there anyway i can know about those links which i uploaded in different files?
Unfortunately this is a common problem and there is no solution. Google doesn't keep record of those previously uploaded disavow files. If you don't have a copy of your previously uploaded files then you'll likely need to re-evaluate your links and submit a full file again.
Hi I am Beginner in SEO,
This is my first comment on MOZ. However, I have read many blog posts here.
I want to know one thing for example; I just found some spammy links are pointing to my site for specific articles and that articles are ranking well in SERP's, Should I consider to disavow these spammy links? though articles are ranking great include spammy backlinks. Waiting for MOZ community answers.
Regards,
M Imran
Hi. This is tough to answer without seeing the links. If these are spammy articles that contained a link primarily for SEO purposes then yes, I'd disavow (or remove) them. If these are articles that someone else wrote that happened to link to me, then it gets tricky. More info on this here:
https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
Thank you for quick reply Marie. Actually, I found that links in MOZ explorer with the spam rating of 7. So I am confused what to do. Am I disavow that spammy links or just leave them. What you will like to suggest me?
Great guide for disavow tool, but i still have a question
I have 4 versions of same domain in webmaster tools
https://example.com
https://www.example.com
https://example.com
https://www.example.com
I've prepared my disavow file , now the question , should I submit it in all 4 versions ?
Because when I visit the Google's disavow tool , it shows me all my sites and it includes all those 4 options.
What to do ???
Thanks
Yes, you need to submit the file to all versions.
Thanks Marie - one of the best articles on the subject - told me everything I needed to know about the tool.. :-)
Hi Marie,
I recently filed a disavow for a client's site on the non-www WMT profile but when I checked for the file on the www profile there was no disavow file present. Now I upload the disavow file to every iteration of the site just in case. Is this necessary or am I being too cautious?
Hi Matt,
I'd definitely recommend uploading the file to all available versions.
Most likely, if your site is only accessible via non-www then you really should only have to submit to this profile. But, there is no harm whatsoever in submitting to both.
John Mueller has been asked before whether you need to submit a new disavow if you have an https version and a non https version of your site in GWT and he recommended that yes, you should submit to both. I think the same would apply to non-www vs www.
Since Analytics changes frequently, does anyone have an update for this path which doesn't exist any more? Search Traffic --> Links to your site -->
Hi Bryan,
Not much changed in Webmaster Tools other than the new name (Google Search Console). You can still find the links to your site in the same way as described in the article. In the left hand column of Webmaster Tools select "Search Traffic" and then, "Links to your Site". Then, click on one of the "more" buttons you see and you'll see the options to download your links.
Hi Andy,
More a case of Google having said that you could add comments (from day 1 when Matt Cutts officially launched the disavow links tool) and people making the assumption that could = should. Also based on an assumption that by shoving comments into a disavow file people could come up with a handy-dandy "do as little work as possible" reconsideration request :(
An excellent step-by-step article Marie :-) One small question though; do you have any verifiable information that "...no Google employee will look at your disavow file" ? I highly doubt many of them ever get looked at by a human; however Google's own example shows the comments are to be included? see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
John Mueller from Google has said it a few times:
https://youtu.be/aKpQQY4S_7w?t=2m30s At 2:30, he says, "We don't read the notes...those are essentially there for you."
And here: https://youtu.be/Ydj10_u9wVs?t=19m20s "Essentially for us, the disavow file is something that is processed completely automatically. If you put a lot of text in those comments in the disavow file then nobody will be looking at that."
wonderful lol - Google says turn right, then Google says turn left ;-)
Thanks for taking the time to respond Marie :-)
Webmasters should be using the Bing disavowal tool also. It can have an almost immediate impact on page being penalized by overly spammy links, particularly for over-optimized anchor text. Bing/Yahoo might be much smaller than Google, but it is worth the small amount of time.
Thank you for your excellent article.
I have struggled to understand Google disavow tool, but after a brief reading your article ... everything is clear!
Thanks marie. It is great informative post. You describe google disavow tool very well.
Bookmarked.
Fantastic resource
Marie - would be interested in your thoughts on whether the Disavow file is then always linked to the domain or just to the Google Webmaster Tools account?
So if, for example, the domain had to operate on a new account in Webmaster Tools because the migration from http: to https: didn't work - then would you need to send the Disavow file again on the new account or just leave it as Google should have attached the previous file to the domain?
I'm so sorry I am just seeing this now...2 months after you asked!
If you have an http version and an https it is important that you have both registered in Webmaster Tools and upload the disavow to each of them.
How can you check if my site has had a Disavow file already submitted? Thanks.
Hi theboo,
To check whether there has been a disavow file already submitted, log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and once logged in go to the Disavow Links tool
Now, choose the site or site variant you wish to check from the dropdown list and click the red "Disavow Links" button.
On the next screen click the white "Disavow Links" button.
If there is a file already submitted you will see a message that says:
The file below contains the list of disavowed links. To edit the list, click Download.
(your filename)
Results for the submission on (date) at (time) You successfully uploaded a disavow links file (your filename) containing XXXX domains and XXXX URLs.
If you want to see what is listed in the disavow file, click the download button. You can choose to download as a CSV file, or into Google docs, but be aware, if you need to edit the file and upload a new version neither of these formats is suitable for upload - you will have to convert to a UTF8 (or unicode) text file in order to submit the new disavow successfully.
Also important to be aware that any future upload will completely overwrite the existing file, so you must add any new domains or links to it and then upload. Otherwise you will lose all of the previous disavows.
There is also a "Delete" button available as well as the "Download". I would caution against using this unless you have a very good reason. Especially since any new upload will overwrite it anyway.
Hope that helps,
Sha
Also, just a suggestion, but if you need help with this kind of question you will most often get a quicker response if you post it in Moz Q&A than the blog :)
Thanks for the detailed reply - a great help Sha & Marie!
Hi theboo. Looks like Sha has given a thorough answer. I'll just add one thing and that is to say that it's a good idea to verify and check all variants of your site as well. For example, if your site is https, make sure you have the https version, www. version and non www. version verified and upload the disavow to each of these.
Also, if it helps, only registered owners of the site can upload or download a disavow.
Thanks for your reply Marie. Is there anyway to check whether the previously uploaded file was for the non-www or the www. ? I followed Sha's steps and see only a websitename.txt file, would i have seen www.websitename.txt if the www. version was uploaded?
Do you have both the www and the non-www created as properties in Webmaster Tools? If so, then you'll see both of these in a dropdown list of sites that are registered to you when you visit the disavow tool. (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-li...
You would then click on each version (www and non-www) and follow the steps that Sha outlined to see if a disavow file is present.
Thanks Marie. I don't have both registered in Webmaster Tools. I'll do this step first.
Hi theboo,
Apologies for not making it clear originally that you need to choose the site or variant from the dropdown list. I've edited my original comment to make that clearer.
Also, this post explains the need to pay attention to variants in penalty work: Are You Stuck In Google's Penalty Box?
Sha
Great Details, Nicely explained the complete Process.
It is a pleasure to find post like this one. Very complete.
Hi Marie,
Great idea to let people know about the pitfalls of using the Disavow Links Tool :)
my site is government jobs employment news,current affairs,general knowledge,general awareness,latest government jobs
but i have some questions that
1. In the disavow, should we include domains that are no longer online, nor are in Google's cache?
2. Should we include domains that removed our link from their site?
I realize the two above questions may seem stupid, however I have received conflicting recommendations from 'so-called' SEO experts and wanted to seek additional input prior to submitting my disavow. Personally, I am leaning toward removing these domains...
[links removed by editor]
tanks. Was very useful