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Back in the day Google created the problem of so-called “negative SEO”.
The better term for it is Google sabotage.
It means people can hurt you on Google search results.
Then they offered a tool to “disavow” links that were harmful.
Should you use it? No! Find out why.
Disavowing is risky
Yet even using the tool itself could potentially hurt your SEO!
Google itself warns publishers as follows:
“Disavow links can only be used on sites with spam manual actions. This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google Search results.”
Sounds convoluted? It isn’t. It’s messed up though.
Don’t use the disavow tool. Here’s why!
Also what to do instead when affected by spammy links or other sabotage attempts.
What is “negative SEO” or rather Google sabotage?
How can you sabotage your competition on Google search results?
There are many ways to do it! None of it is SEO as in fixing things.
SEO is about optimization or improving things. There is no such thing as negative improvement.
You either fix or break things.
So “negative SEO” does not exist. Sabotage on Google is possible though.
Sabotaging your competition is about breaking things and make it look as if your rivals are responsible.
So Google provided a solution for the problem it created: the disavow tool.
Unless you buy links and got a penalty. What penalty?
How did Google allow sabotage of your competition?
Google allowed sabotage of competing websites in search results by implementing penalties for “unnatural links”.
How did that happen exactly? Google started taking “manual actions” on inbound links webmasters have no control over.
Instead of just discounting “unnatural links” pointing to your site Google would make you responsible for them!
Then Google came up with a “disavow tool” to let website owners claim they are not responsible for links pointing at them!
Usually spammers would use it to discount the links they bought previously.
Yet you can also use it to hurt competing websites! Here’s how!
In general the disavow tool is not used anymore by SEO experts.
In essence it is rather an outing tool for you and the sites that linked to you.
Spammers that got penalized or were afraid to get a penalty would claim they have nothing to do with the links that point at their site.
Sometimes legit online publishers would try that as well in the early days around 2012.
Yet over the years Google rather discounted “unnatural links” from third parties.
There are of course many ways to sabotage your competition on Google search yet links were the most wide-spread one.
Google penalized you for what neighbor did!
How could others hurt site by pointing link at yours?
Google penalized site owners when other publishers pointed bad links them.
Saboteurs would buy spammy links to your site to hurt you!
In theory you could manually disavow “toxic links” to your site and get the penalty lifted then.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Often you did not even know whether someone or an automated system even reviewed and discounted those links.
Yet with the so-called disavow tool Google offered another “opportunity” to sabotage others on Google!
You could also tell Google that competing sites linking to you were toxic!
Why do “negative SEO”? It’s to make others disappear from search results.
Some people got paid to remove links pointing to your site.
Some of people would even blackmail you! Either you pay or they keep on linking to you.
It’s also a bizarre set-up where Google is judge, jury and executioner!
It’s a crime case that hasn’t existed on the Web prior to Google.
Links are scary ever since
The outcome is simple: people are afraid of links as a whole and do not trust each other.
Linking to other sites gets even more risky as you may get a cease and desist note from a lawyer and so on.
Google offered a solution for the problem it created, a so-called link disavow tool.
You can use it to tell Google which links pointing to your site you do not trust.
You can make Google discount these links then.
Now let us look at the problem at hand again. Does the disavow tool solve it?
- We are still responsible for third party links pointing to our site
- We have still to monitor those links
- We can still get penalized for being linked to by other sites.
The only thing that has changed is that we have a higher workload.
We need to tell Google manually about each link we deem suspicious.
Google got lots of reports this way. They needed them because they couldn’t find an algorithmic way to deal with spammy links.
Google needed crowdsourcing by real people to do the work of sifting through the Web to find the spam.
They just needed to motivate the people to do the work.
Now let’s look again at the problem of “negative SEO” in general.
Does it get solved y the disavow tool? No. You can even use the disavow tool for “negative SEO”.
I don’t mean against or to defend yourself against “negative SEO”.
I really mean using the Google disavow tool to hurt your competition.
How does Google sabotage work?
Now don’t kill the messenger. I don’t recommend “negative SEO”!
I consider it highly unethical to try to hurt your colleagues from “the competition“.
Use so called “negative SEO” techniques like “Google Bowling” (pointing bad links at competitors) at your own peril.
Nonetheless I have to tell you what risks come with the disavow tool.
Here are some quick and really dirty ways how Google sabotage using the disavow tool could work!
Guest posts
Imagine the following situation: I write a guest post on a site A and link back to my own site B.
Then I use the disavow tool to tell Google to discount the link from site A.
A week later I write another guest post on site A using a different name and mail address and linking to another site, C.
Again I disavow the link from site A to site C afterwards.
I repeat the process and after a while several sites have reported site A as not trustworthy.
Can site A get penalized for it? It could happen.
Now you may infer that this is an unlikely scenario.
Who would go to such great lengths to hurt the competition?
Well, you just need to hire someone cheap Asian contractor.
There are millions of Indians waiting to do this for a few bucks.
Pingbacks
There are even easier way to to use the disavow tool for negative SEO.
So called trackbacks and pingbacks are perfect. WordPress supports them by default.
You can make other sites and blogs link to you simply by linking to them.
The blog software (e.g. WordPress) will take care of it.
You ping the site A from several sites, B, C, D etc. and then you disavow the links from site A.
Again Google receives many reports of bad links from site A.
It’s probable that site A gets downranked at least a bit.
Otherwise disavowing links wouldn’t make sense.
Why would Google allow this again?
Why does Google allow “negative SEO” in the first place?
I have explained already why it makes sense for Google to make links a risky business.
It may help them in the long run to make the foundation of the Web – hypertext – a thing of the past.
They could provide a safer “walled garden” type of Web where people stay on Google properties itself then.
Google vs the open Web
In many ways Google wants to push its own proprietary kind of Web.
They tried it based on real names, proprietary (authorship) markup and Google controlled links in the past.
They tried this with
- Google+
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
- AI Overviews
and other proprietary technologies already.
The disavow tool is a similar way to fool SEO practitioners.
SEOs effectively out themselves as spammers using the tool.
In the short run they want myriads of optimizers to submit spam reports.
Why? It’s to make the broken Google algorithm work again as long as it is still largely based on links.
So the disavow tool is not a solution of the “negative SEO” problem!
It just makes things worse by creating more Google sabotage opportunities.
Btw. I considered disavowing links from SEO blogs I have written for who haven’t paid me haha.
Also I could ask my peers to do the same thing. After all I got cheated.
There are many more reasons to use the disavow tool for “negative SEO”.
This is just a short post though. So it’s the end of that!
Just don’t use the disavow tool unless you are spammer.
Otherwise you hurt your SEO by admitting you are one.
What to do when someone sabiates your site on Google?
So it really happened to you? Someone bought spammy links to your site?
Then Google penalized you?
Ensure you do proper SEO and get legit links by attracting them!
If you really got a manual action penalty rather publicize the case and make Google respond in public.
Disavowing links is admitting you are guilty and responsible for those links!
It’s saying: I spammed Google! I know which links I bought.
Sound harmful to me. What about you?
* Creative Commons image by Ashley Rose