How to Use the Google Disavow Tool for NOT Against Negative SEO
*
Google first created the problem of so called “negative SEO“ by taking “manual action” on links webmasters have no control over.
Instead of just discounting “unnatural links” pointing to a site Google will make you responsible for them even though other webmasters point those links at your site.
We have a situation where people buy spammy links to your site to make it disappear from search results. Or people get paid to remove links pointing to your site.
Some of people will even blackmail you! Either you pay or they keep on linking to you.
It’s a bizarre set-up where Google is judge, jury and executioner in a crime case that hasn’t existed on the Web prior to Google.
Links are scary now
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.
Now Google offers 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 webmasters.
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 gets lots of reports. They need them because they can’t find an algorithmic way to deal with them.
Google needs 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 combat 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” and I consider it highly unethical to try to hurt your competition.
Use so called “negative SEO” tactics 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.
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?
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 some submission service. There are millions of Indians waiting to do this for a few bucks.
There are even easier way to to use the disavow tool for negative SEO. So called trackbacks and pingbacks are perfect.
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 disavoing links wouldn’t make sense.
Why would Google allow this again? Why do they allow “negative SEO” in the first place?
I have explained already why it makes sense for Google to make links a risky business and to actually make the foundation of the Web, hypertext a thing of the past.
Google vs the open Web
Google wants to push its own proprietary kind of Web, based on real names, authorship markup and Google controlled +1 links in the long run.
In the short run they want myriads of webmasters to submit spam reports to make their broken algorithm work again as long as it is still based on links.
So the disavow tool is not a solution of the negative SEO problem it just makes things worse by creating more negative SEO opportunities.
Btw. I consider disavowing links from SEO blogs I have written for who haven’t paid me. 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.
* Creative Commons image by Ashley Rose
I must say it is highly unlikely that somebody will do it. Also, google himself had written that they will not disavow every link they get. They’ll first check the links & it’ll take weeks to perform.
I don’t know why but everywhere people talk of indians only. They spam, they do low quality link building, they submit links in poker site now they’ll disavow links also. I don’t agree with you on this part.
hyderali: It’s also unlikely that people would use other negative SEO tactics but they do. That’s the reality.
You know that I like Indians, I even love Indian food, Indian tea, Indian music (Bhangra! etc.) and Indian spirituality. So I’m the last one to say that Indians “suck”.
We all know though that the still very young SEO industry from Asia, in large parts from India is based on low quality, cheap and mass produced SEO.
It’s just an economic reality where people in India are forced to do this work. So I didn’t mean to insult Indians.
Some of the people I look up to are Indians residing all over the world. Just think Amit Singhal, Dharmesh Shah, Neil Patel etc.
This quote:
“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…”
That’s a lot of trouble to go to. And it relies on site A letting you guest post!!
I don’t think Google will use solely disavowed link requests to declare a site untrustworthy and if the guest posts you wrote on the site were of high quality, then why should site A be penalised?
If the posts were awful and site A still allowed them on, then it’s site A’s own fault for not quality controlling ;-)
Duke: What more can I say! I couldn’t agree more. You just summarized my post in a few sentences. Thank you!
Stacy: That’s just one example. There are many ways to get people first to link to you and then to disavow those links. Also it’s an example I have used because like I say in my post I have people who haven’t paid me for blogging on their blogs. Now I can strike back by disavowing those links. I probably won’t but it’s possible now.
I think this whole Disavow link thing is just the search engines attempt to throw spanner in the seo works. One of the major headache for every seo is transparency from the search engines. They are the ones who decide to credit or punish links “they” deem as spam. If they have the capability to detect spam links, why do webmasters have to tell them to Disavow links? Shouldn’t just ignore the links and give you credit for the ones they deem natural. That will solve two problems i think. Firtly, it will discourage those involved in spammy links because their efforts won’t achieve increase rankings and/or traffic. Secondly, those engaged in negative seo won’t achieve anything. This Disavow links has proven that negative seo does work and will only energise those involved in it.
Shame Google and Bing couldn’t do a better job in cleaning the search community
Hi Tad,
I wrote a similar “rant” about the same topic some weeks ago, when BING launched their Disavow Tool” in which i drew some possible future szenarios and impacts of a tool like that:
http://blog.kennstdueinen.de/2012/07/warum-das-feature-links-entwerten-blanker-wahnsinn-ist/
As Duke Tanson commented, it’s just Google trying to let SEOs and Webmaster work for them to repair the broken algorithm…
… and it’s a confessions from Google, that they can’t keep up technologically with link-manipulation.
Regards,
Sebastian
Hmm. I thought this looked like it would have the potential for abuse. What would stop someone from simply submitting a list of competitors’ incoming links? Is Google really going to apply the data from individual disavow lists to rest of the index? Seems like they would if there are enough complaints about a given site, kind of like the webspam or paid link reports. But then again, maybe not – not all disavowed links are inherently bad, just bad because of overused anchor text or other spam signals. (comment also duplicated on G+)
[…] apart that technique, which could be done by very good black hat SEOs, there is also another very simple opportunity, which can be used by almost everyone, who may consider the web a […]
I think some links will still pass through Google’s eyes no matter how control them.
[…] it; one of my favorites amongst them is by Tad Chef. He wrote an interesting must read post about link disavow, that I would highly recommend to you. You might not find this in Google search results as he has […]
Google claims these days that they just ignore these types of links. However, I’ve seen many studies where toxic links have caused a drop in rankings still so I’m not 100% convinced.
Anyway, great post.
Take care
Jamie