Google Disavow Links Tool

Matt Cutts the head of Google’s web spam announced at the PubCon keynote that Google has launched a new tool. The Disavow Links Tool has been beta tested by some selected SEOs. This tool will be used to tell Google to ignore low-quality links that have harmed the PageRank or page ranking of a site.

Matt Cutts warned to use the tool with caution. He recommended that publishers should work first with the site owners that are hosting the links to remove the links that they have concerned with before using the Disavow Links Tool.

Disavowing Links

A website owner can disavow links by uploading a text file with either individual URLs or entire domains. These are the links that you want google to ignore. Matt Cutts said that it takes several weeks to disavow links. This tool is for those backlinks you are unable to remove.

Who Can Use This Tool?

The majority of the sites do not necessarily need this tool. This is for those who have been impacted by Google’s Penguin Update, which hit websites that may have purchase links or gained through spamming.

What Happens After  Disavowing Link?

According to Matt Cutts the disavow tool is the same as using the “nofollow” attribute, which allows sites to link to other sites without passing ranking credits to those sites. He also said that Google reserves the right not to use the submissions if it feels there’s a reason not to trust them.

To learn more about this feature you can watch this video below.

Google works hard in preventing other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking. If there are backlinks that made you worried of affecting your site’s reputation then Disavow Link Tool can be used to indicate Google that those links should be ignored.