How to Use Google's Disavow Tool

Webmasters always suffer from low quality links that point to their site without their knowledge. These low quality links are a kind of spam or may be a result of negative SEO tactics by your competitors and they can harm your site’s ranking in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Hence you should remove unnatural backlinks. Google has announced the Disavow tool to help the webmasters in overcoming this issue and here is the step by step procedure on how to use this tool.

Step 1: Log in to your Webmasters account and Click “Search Traffic” on the left bar. Click “Links to Your Site”.

Step 2: You will find the links that point to your site under “Who links the most”. Click “more” and you will get a table of all links that point to your site.

Step 3: Download the table of all the external links by clicking the button “Download this table”.”Download latest links” will give you the list of links that linked to you recently. You can download this table in CSV format and as Google Docs as well.   

Step 4: Carefully go through this table and make a list of the links that you find are unnatural. Have a close look at irrelevant sites, paid sites, malware attacked sites, link exchange sites, spam sites etc. Be vigilant in preparing this list as disavowing links that are useful, may nagatively affect your site’s performance.

Step 5: Save these unnatural links in a text document. There are certain standards in preparing this text document.

• Use (.txt) file only. Other formats such as (.doc, .docx, .xlv, .csv) etc. are not valid.

• White mentioning an individual link for disavowing, Use the following format.

                  E.g.:

                         http://malwaresite.com/badcontent.html

                         http://www.malwaresite.com/spam.html

                         The usage of “http://” is MANDATORY

• If you want to disavow all the links that come from a particular domain, then follow the format below.

                          domain: malwaresite.com

                        “http://” or “www” should NOT be used.

Step 6: Once you are done with preparing this file, you have to submit it to Google. This can be done by following the steps given below. 

• Click the link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 and login with your username and password. Once entered into webmasters tool, click “Disavow Links”

• The above page will appear. Choose the (.txt) file that you have created and click “Submit”. And now you’re done with disavowing the unnatural links that point to your site.

You can remove unnatural backlinks by following the above steps.  For a good effect, it is recommended that this tool may be used once in two months. According to Google, the action based on your request will take a few months and manual submission of link removal is encouraged. But for bulk disavowing, this tool is highly useful.

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Here's what Google's Matt Cutts has to say about Disavow tools

Manual backlink audit