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Title:
Disavow links
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Description:
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>>Matt Cutts: Hey everybody. We just released
a new tool called the disavow links tool,
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which lets you tell Google which links to
your site you'd like to ignore. Let me give
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you a little bit of context, tell you about
how it works, and basically fill you in on
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the background.
As Google has gotten better and better at
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assessing backlinks, there are some people
who more or less want to clean up their backlinks.
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Maybe you've been doing paid links, or someone
on your behalf has. You might have been doing
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blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, guest
book spam, you-name-it link spam. Maybe you
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paid somebody to write some low-quality articles
and syndicate those all over the place with
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some very keyword rich anchor text. And maybe
Google sent you a message that says, "We've
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seen unnatural links to your site" or "We've
taken targeted action to some unnatural links
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to your site." And as a result, you want to
clean up those backlinks.
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Well, first and foremost, the main thing that
we recommend is getting those links actually
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removed from the web. If a random person looks
up links to your site, you don't want to see
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a bunch of spammy links. It's good to clean
up for other purposes. You don't want them
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to jump to conclusions. It's also good so
that other search engines won't see spammy
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links to your site as well.
We do recommend that you write to people,
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try to get the link taken down, and basically
get as many of those links as possible. Now,
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at the same time, we realize that sometimes,
it's not possible to get in contact with everybody.
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So at the point where you have written to
as many people as you can multiple times,
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you've really tried hard to get in touch,
and you've only been able to get some certain
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fraction of those links down, and there's
still a small fraction of links left, that's
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where you can use our new tool, called the
disavow links tool.
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So how does it work? Well, first off, you
need to figure out "Which links should I disavow?"
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Hopefully, you have a pretty good idea, but
there's a couple ways you can take a whack
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at that. First, you can look at your recent
links. We will show you, now, Google will
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let you download a list of links sorted by
the date that we discovered them. So you can
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look at the most recent links, if you might
have just gotten a message or a warning about
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unnatural links.
We're working on ways where when we provide
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links that we, the unnatural links warning,
we'll actually, in the text of that message,
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give you maybe one, maybe two, possibly up
to three examples of the sorts of links that
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we're talking about.
Now, this is not a comprehensive list. We're
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saying, "These are the sorts of links that
we're trying to ignore, or that we don't count,
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or that we think looks low-quality or spammy."
And so the message does not mean "Remove these
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two or three links and now do a reconsideration
request." It's to give you a flavor of the
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sorts of links, whether it's a low-quality
article bank thing that you were syndicating,
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or whether it's a paid link network, or whatever.
The sorts of links that we would like to see
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taken down.
So how do you actually use the tool? How do
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you disavow links? It's actually pretty simple.
We want to reiterate that most people do not
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need to use this tool. There's been a little
bit of brouhaha in the last few months where
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some people really want to clean up their
backlinks. But if you're an average Mom and
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Pop, if you're just doing normal sorts of
things, you're not doing really especially
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egregious or aggressive SEO with all kinds
of weird link networks or stuff like that,
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this is not a tool that you should need to
use under any sort of normal circumstances.
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So when you load up the tool, you'll hopefully
see a lot of disclaimers that remind you,
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under normal circumstances, you shouldn't
need to use this. Only if you've gotten a
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message, if you really think there's an issue
with your backlinks, and you really want to
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clean it up, and you're a power user, you
feel comfortable doing technical things.
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The first version of the interface that we're
launching reflects that. It's basically the
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ability to upload a text file of links that
you'd like to ignore. So my site, for example,
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is mattcutts.com. Suppose I want to ignore
a link from example.com/page.html. You simply
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make a text file that says "example.com/page.html"
and you upload that. So the format is just
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one URL per line. We try to make it a little
bit easy. Suppose you have a porn site, pornsite.com,
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and it links to you. And you want to ignore
all links from that domain. You can say "domain:pornsite.com."
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You can also have comments, you can have little
hash signs, you can document your efforts
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to try to get links pulled down or provide
some more context there. And then you just
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basically upload that text file.
Now, it's a single text file for a domain.
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So if you have multiple registered owners,
and you want to add or edit or update that
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file, we provide a way to download that file.
Then you would be able to edit it. You can
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add another link to ignore, or anything along
those lines. If you wanted to, you could empty
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that file out, and then you can reupload that,
and we will process that in turn.
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Now, how will Google actually treat it when
you say, "I'd like Google to ignore this link"?
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We treat it as a very strong suggestion, but
we don't treat it as something that we absolutely
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have to abide by. And before you get nervous
or worried, that's the exact same methodology
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that we use for rel="canonical." So we have
seen some guys where they will have a website,
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and they say, "Oh, I'm going to rel="canonical"
over here," and that's a 404, and they can
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shoot themselves in the foot. So we do reserve
the right to look at things and say, "Oh,
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we think this is something that the user didn't
intend to do." But in normal circumstances,
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we will take it as a very strong suggestion,
and basically treat it a lot like 'nofollow'.
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Drop that link out of our processing.
We do expect that it will take probably weeks
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once you upload your list of links to disavow
for all those links to be disavowed because
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we have to recrawl those pages, reindex those
pages, and reprocess them in order to attach
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the attribute that says, "Okay, this link
we would like to no longer treat with the
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same weight. We would like to treat it with
zero weight."
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So it does take a fair amount of time. If
you're doing a reconsideration request, I
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would explicitly mention, "Hey, I have disavowed
links," just so that we can go and try to
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check up on that whenever the manual web spam
team is investigating.
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The other thing I would say is this is a power
user tool. We don't want people to go overboard
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with this. Most people shouldn't need to use
this. Really only use it if you have good
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reason to think that you need to. In particular,
somebody is sure to ask, "Well, what if I
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want to undisavow a link, or reavow it?" And
the answer is, "That will take even longer."
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So I would say, once you disavow a link, make
sure that it's a link that you really want
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to disavow, that you don't want to have it
count anymore, because it will take a lot
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longer, and we might not give it the same
weight if we start to allow it to be reavowed.
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So only take a look at the links that were
either provided as examples or the links that
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you think are truly spammy, and those are
the ones that you really want to disavow.
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Try as much as you can to clean things up
beforehand, and then use the disavow tool
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afterwards, if you feel comfortable.
The last thing I just want to reiterate, and
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I want to really get this across: most people
should not need to use this. We build our
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algorithms and we look at our spam processing
such that in most cases, we handle things
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just fine. A very small number of people are
getting these unnatural links warnings. Proportional
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to the web, most people do not need to be
using this tool.
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It's also an advanced tool, just like with
rel="canonical." If you rel="canonical" to
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somewhere that doesn't exist, it is possible
to shoot yourself in the foot. So be carefully.
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Don't just go in willy-nilly and submit a
ton of files, and you're like, "Okay, I'm
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changing a whole bunch of stuff every single
time." You really want to maybe do an audit
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of your backlinks and try to get an idea of
the ones that look truly spammy, or the ones
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that, according to recent stuff, look like
they are not what links that they should count.
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Those are the links that you might want to
think about disavowing.
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I realize, even if I tell everybody this,
there will still be a lot of people who just
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run for the disavow link tool. But again,
whenever we're doing reconsideration requests,
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we are going to look at the set of links that
existed before. And then we're going to be
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doing spot checks. We're going to be look
at "Are those links off the web?" So don't
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just immediately think, "Disavow is the answer
for all my ills!" You're also going to want
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to try to remove stuff off the web first.
And this is a power tool. It's something where
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it is possible, in the process of telling
Google to ignore links to your site, to make
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mistakes. So I would approach it with caution.
I wouldn't just jump in. If you are a Mom
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and Pop, if you haven't used your own SEO,
if you haven't used random link networks that
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you found on SEO Forums, this is probably
not something that you should be using. I
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just want to try to reiterate that. Hopefully,
everybody can remind everybody else of that
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if people are talking about it on forums or
conferences or whatever.
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But we are pretty excited to be able to offer
this because we do hear from SEOs who try
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to do clean up. There's an entire niche for
people, for SEOs, whose job it is to clean
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up backlinks. And this is a tool in that arsenal,
after you've done all the other cleanup that
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you can do. So we're really happy that we
are providing this option. And thanks for
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all the feedback for the people who asked
for it. Let us know what you think of it,
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and then we'll continue to iterate and look
at other ways to improve. Thanks.
