Google’s John Mueller, at the Search Central NYC event, answered a question about what to do about toxic backlinks and responded with an overview of what goes on inside Google with links in order to explain why the disavow tool is something only sites that are guilty of something and know it should be using.
What To Do If Disavow Tool Is No Longer Available?
Google has a tool that allows publishers and SEOs to disavow links, which is basically telling Google to not count certain links. The purpose of the disavow tool arose after Google penalized countless thousands of sites for buying links. This was during the Penguin update in 2012. Getting rid of paid links was a difficult thing and some link sellers were asking for payment for removing the links. SEOs raised the idea of a disavow tool to help them get rid of the links their clients and themselves purchased and after a time Google agreed to provide that tool for that one purpose: to remove paid links.
Someone submitted a question for John Mueller to answer, asking what should SEOs do if the disavow tool is no longer available, asking:
“How can we remove toxic backlinks?”
The phrase “toxic backlinks” is something that the SEO backlink removal services and tools invented as part of scaring people into buying their backlink data and tools. That’s not a phrase that Googlers used, it’s totally 100% invented by SEO tool companies.
Google’s John Mueller answered:
“So internally we don’t have a notion of toxic backlinks. We don’t have a notion of toxic backlinks internally.
So it’s not that you need to use this tool for that. It’s also not something where if you’re looking at the links to your website and you see random foreign links coming to your website, that’s not bad nor are they causing a problem.
For the most part, we work really hard to try to just ignore them. I would mostly use the disavow tool for situations where you’ve been actually buying links and you’ve got a manual link spam action and you need to clean that up. Then the Disavow tool kind of helps you to resolve that, but obviously you also need to stop buying links, otherwise that manual action is not going to go away.”
Disavowing Links Is Not Normal Site Maintenance
Mueller continued his answer by pointing out that using a disavow tool on a regular basis is not a normal thing to do as part of site maintenance.
He said:
“But that’s essentially like from my point of view, the disavow tool is not something that you need to do on a regular basis. It’s not a part of normal site maintenance. I would really only use that if you have a manual spam action.”
I know there are some people who are “victims” of bad inbound links and blame those links for their poor rankings. So they disavow the bad links and their rankings never improve. One would think that the failure of the disavow tool to fix their ranking problems would cause them to see if something else is the problem but some people are so convinced that their sites are perfect that considering their site is poorly optimized is not an option for them.
But all of the cases I’ve looked at where people say they’re victims of negative SEO, 100% of them have problems with their SEO or content issues. Google’s algorithms aren’t affected by random links, that’s just not how link ranking algorithms work.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
