Recently, Google launched the Disavow Link Tool which was designed to help online businesses that were being subjected to negative SEO attacks. Usually, the form of these attacks was to attach spammy links to your highly rated content. In this manner, your website would be penalized and lose its ranking and visibility.
Furthermore, if your website suffered too many of these attacks it would be unfairly penalized. For many, the only option seemed to be ending the website, buying a new domain and starting all over again. However, the introduction of the Disavow Link Tool by Google promised to be a valid method of regaining your status by attacking the very links that were dragging your website down.
Unfortunately, there is a serious follow up issue with this particular tool that has made it far less effective than promised. In fact, many people have become dismayed that the negative SEO tactics which they thought were a thing of the past instead are not being dealt with in as nearly an efficient manner as they were originally led to believe.
The Time Factor
The core problem with the Disavow Link Tool is that your request to remove the link does not produce an immediate result. In fact, it can take weeks or even months in some cases for the negative link to be removed from consideration for your content. This means that if you rely on the Disavow tool alone, your website could very well be off the website ranking and invisible to the public before you can have any of negative links resolved.
Negative SEO in 2013
Because the Disavow Link Tool has shown to be not nearly as effective as first thought, there will not doubt be a more aggressive use of negative SEO in 2013. The core strategy of negative SEO is finding highly popular content of the competition that has generating a high ranking and bringing it down by linking it with poor or spammy links.
The Google algorithms are tuned to seek out spam, having your content associated with spammy links will assuredly bring your website ranking down. In fact, the new Disavow Link Tool may be nothing more than a somewhat updated version of the old “The Spam Report” which also was criticized for not having enough power to effectively deal with spammy links.
What Can You Do?
There are a number of ways you can help overcome this inherent problem with the Disavow Link Tool. You are probably much better off making multiple link removal requests on your own to handing the problem, especially if it is widespread. By pounding it with personal requests for link removal, you stand a much better chance of solving the issue sooner.
Once you have reduced the number of negative links to just a few, then the Disavow Link Tool can be more effective in getting rid of what is left. If you are facing a minor spammy link or two here and there, then the Disavow Link Tool is generally at its best. Otherwise, you are much better off making the link removal requests yourself. However it also takes several months to be considered.
Have you been havng problem with negative SEO? Let us know.
I hired a bad SEO firm who built really spammy links to my site, several of them from sites banned by Google. How can I get these sites to remove the links – do I just email them and ask? They seem like sites that aren’t really run by real people, just giant spam directories…
Google ignores spammy links. If you cannot keep in touch with those website owners, don’t worry, those links won’t count anymore. You can also use Disavow link tool in your Google webmaster tool account.
I guess I’m confused a little by this. If Google ignores these links and isn’t counting them, is the disavow tool for sites Google still does index, but our links on them are considered low quality if we’ve tried to use the same target text for them all? If a site seems to be banned by Google and is no longer in the index, do I need to bother with putting the links from those sites into my disavow list or are those links already ignored?
If a website is banned on domain level,forget about it. Disavow link tool won’t work on a banned website nor does any other tactic. If a tier 2 or tier 3 link of a website is sandboxed for a certain keyword or key phrase, it is temporary and it will come out between 3-6 months. During sandbox you can create quality content under your domain and bookmark the article on high PR bookmarking websites. This will send a signal to Google and hopefully it comes out of sandbox faster. Because you are telling to Google that your website is an authority site and offers quality content.
This is another great article, thank you! When identifying links that I should try to remove, is there any easy way to know if they’re actually hurting my site? For instance I participate in a forum regularly, and have my website link in my signature. I’m not spamming the forum, but can Google tell that, or does it just see my link hundreds of times and assume its spam. I don’t want to remove this link without knowing, because the forum is a high PR site, so it could be helping my site. On the other hand, it could be hurting it also & I just don’t know how to tell.
Site wide links will fall into the spam category and hurt a website’s ranking. It does not matter if a forum has a high PR, when a forum gets bigger and generates more pages, those links of yours get more back links, however they come from one single domain. It is better to add your social media account in forum signature and not your money website. After Google’s latest algorithm update, many websites lost their ranking because their domains for some reason were connected to some forums. Google has implemented an algorithm in their search engine that detects forum signature pattern.