Matt Cutts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Big announcement moments ago by +Matt Cutts at #Pubcon Las Vegas : Google is today introducing a backlink disavowal tool in Webmaster Tools to allow sites hit by manual ranking penalties to disavow bad backlinks they have been unable to remove.
Matt Shared some tips and cautions for the tool:
- Be careful, Don’t use unless you are sure you neeed to.
- Google now is messaging nearly 100% of webmasters whose sites have received a manual penalty. If you don’t have a message in Webmaster Tools, you can probably assume your ranking drop was the result of an algorithm change, and removing or disavowing links won’t help you.
- Remove all links from web you can first. This is very important! The disavow tool is not a substitute for first removing as many bad links as you can.
- In the tool, upload a text file, one URL per line, of links to ignore
- Use domain: to ignore domain links
- Most sites should not use this tool! It is only for those who are sure they have been manually penalized by Google because of bad backlinks, and who have already worked at removing links by contacting the link posters.
Because it is still necessary to manually remove as many links as possible before using link disavowal, link removal tools/services like RemoveEm will still be needed by most in this kind of trouble. RemoveEm automates most of the link removal process and helps you get to removal of your penalty faster.
Access the Google disavow links tool at:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
