Week 4 – Disavow

🅳 for DISAVOW

To disavow is to tell Search Engines (Google and Bing have their own tools for this) that ‘these links are worthless/spammy, please don’t count them’.

This is important because LINKS PLAY A HUGE PART IN ORGANIC RANKINGS. (just in case you didn’t realise). The disavow file that contains pages and/or domains from external sites is then not counted towards your overall ‘link profile’.
There is some debate in the world of #seo if this process is necessary now as G has often said “we’ll just ignore particularly crummy links anyway” but others, including me, have seen big benefits when a disavow file has been uploaded. Google does seem to process it pretty quickly.

One other big point is NOT TO DO THIS LIGHTLY. If you disavow good or the wrong links you could have a huge impact on your organic rankings. The consensus is pretty much that if you’ve done ‘link building’ in the past (say you signed up for all those rubbish directories from 8-10 years ago) and have seen a decline in organic traffic then you could well benefit from disavowing.

This is a useful resource from Search Engine Land on all things Disavow – and if you must start the process with Google, here’s the official place to get started.

It really is a job for the experts though – it works, but tread carefully!