In the world of SEO, not all links are created equal. A link profile is the combination of all the links pointing to your site. Valuable backlinks from reputable websites can help your website achieve better rankings and a higher domain authority. However, spammy or unnatural links can harm your site. Disavowing Links is an important step to clean up a toxic link profile and prevent potential search engine penalties.
What is a toxic link?
A toxic link is a link that violates a search engine’s guidelines. These links can be a result of a few different things:
- Paid links: Links that you paid for. While a search engine doesn’t know if you paid for a link, it recognizes websites that are often used for paid link building.
- Link exchanges: You link to me, and I’ll link to you in exchange. This is a common practice that can look unnatural to a search engine.
- Automated links: Spammy links that were built in an automated way.
- Negative SEO: A competitor might build a lot of spammy links to your website to make it look bad to a search engine.
What is disavowing?
Disavowing a link is a way to tell a search engine to ignore it. It’s a way of saying, “I think this link does not meet the guidelines, so please don’t use it to assess my website.” This is a great way to keep your link profile clean and avoid a manual penalty.
When should I disavow links?
A search engine is very clear about when you should disavow links: only disavow links when you get a manual action regarding your link profile. A manual action is when a human reviewer at a search engine has found a serious problem with your website. If you receive a manual action, you’ll see a notification in your search console.
If you are worried about an unnatural link but have not received a manual action, you should not disavow it. A search engine is very good at recognizing unnatural links and will ignore them on its own. If you disavow a link that has value, you could actually be hurting your rankings.
How to create and submit a disavow file
The disavow tool is part of a search console. To use it, you need to create a text file that contains all the URLs that you want a search engine to ignore.
Creating the disavow file
- Create an empty text file. You can use any text editor to create the file.
- Add the URLs. You can add the URLs of the pages you want to ignore. You can also ignore all links from a specific domain by using a domain operator, like domain:spammy-mc-spam.com.
- Save the file. You should save the file on your computer as a .txt file. We recommend giving the file a meaningful name, like siteguru-disavow-july.txt.
Submitting the file
Once you have created the file, you can submit it to your search console. You need to have access to the search console property of the site. Be careful! It’s easy to make a mistake in the disavow file. Accidentally disavowing relevant links to your site can hurt your link profile and result in lower rankings.
A word of warning
Disavowing links can negatively affect your rankings. You should only disavow a link if you’re sure it hurts your link profile. If you’re in doubt, and you did not get a manual action, don’t touch it.
Our platform can help you with this. Clickrank can analyze your website and provide a list of anchor texts that are being used to link to your website. This can help you identify any unnatural links that might be hurting your rankings.
