A few days ago at Pubcon, Matt Cutts of Google announced the “new and improved Disavow Link tool”. (A good write-up of the Google announcement at PubCon by Lisa Barone).
So what is this tool? Bascically it’s a way to tell Google which links pointing at your site are low quality junk that you don’t really want held against you. (In case say, a competitor purchased bad links for your site to try to hurt your rankings). Yeah, that’s it.
But do you need to worry? Well, if you didn’t see a big drop in your rankings, or in your search traffic over the past couple of years for your site, you’re probably fine.
But, If your site has a large number of spamming inbound links, you may want to check with the person doing your SEO about running this tool on your site to clean up some of your past indiscretions. Again, for most people this won’t be a problem. Just keep up the good fight of
a. adding good quality content to your site (via a blog or adding pages)
b. getting a guest blog opportunity on a relevant site which includes a link back to you
c. encouraging others to link to your content via social networking and social bookmarking tools.
Here’s a deeper look at the tool by David Naylor.
Oh, speaking of rankings. Remember my post called “Movies without Shaq in them“? I just checked my rankings for that phrase while not logged in, and that post now ranks in 5th position on page 1 of Google. Kinda fun.
-Andy
1 reply on “Google launches Disavow Links Tool, but should you care?”
Thanks for the heads up Andy! Being good and doing good with content and worthy links back to your site should always be an SEO priority.
It’s nice to see Google encouraging best business practices and hopefully that will bring the best web pages to their rightful place.
I’m still amazed to see such terribly outdated and content vacant sites still ranking well. Sites that haven’t updated there content since 2001! How are they able to still rank well?