Google Disavow Tool: When and How to Disavow Backlinks 2024

Disavow Backlinks: When we talk about high domain authority, backlinks are one of the essential factors, along with high-quality content and technical SEO. Unknowingly, sometimes, we create spam backlinks that are not good for the website’s growth. Therefore, we might need to get rid of those spam backlinks.

Google’s algorithm crawls webpages and backlinks to identify spam and protect its user’s websites from drank from the search engine results page. Link penalty can destroy your successful website to zero in a second. If your website is the only source of income, regularly check the backlinks to avoid the link penalty.

If you have been already hit, your website has been hit, and you are worried about that. There is a way to get rid of it. Google’s Disavow Tool allows you to reduce the impact of spam manual backlinks and save your website from destruction.

Why and When to Disavow backlinks?

Typically, backlinks are better; someone shares your content with their audience. But not permanently; some links can damage your website’s SEO. Therefore, you should check spam backlinks and unnatural links.

Some of the spam backlinks categories:

• Spam sites
• Spam comments
• Backlinks from the pages that are not from similar niche websites.
• Pages created only to get backlinks

Backlinks can improve the Domain Authority and visibility in the search engines. But bad backlinks only damage the website and cause a loss of ranking.

Note: Don’t delete all the backlinks to your website. They play a crucial role in brand awareness, referrals, and engagement.

Google even shared a warning on the Google Disavow Tool page:

As we all know, the Penguin (the algorithm that measures the backlinks) was more intelligent and devalued the spam backlinks. This is why Google’s Disavow Tool is necessary to avoid harmful or spam backlinks and save your website from penalty.

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What to do before disavow backlinks?

Disavow backlinks is a serious matter. You can damage your SEO through a mistake. You have to understand whether the links are spam or not.

The best way, you can do is write an email to the owner of the website and request them to remove the link. If you can’t find their email ID, then you can contact them at:

• Social media
• Comment on their blog post
• Search on Google for the website owner’s name

If you try all the above ways to connect with them, you should use Google’s Disavow Tool to disavow backlinks.

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How do you find spam backlinks?

Knowing the spam backlinks is important before using Google’s Disavow Tool. You have high-quality content and then have many backlinks for your website. There are many tools available to find the spam score.

But how do you identify which links are harmful to your website?

I will use the SEMrush backlink audit tool to check the spam backlinks.

SEMrush is one of the best backlink checker tools I’ve ever used.

SEMrush has many factors to analyze each link. Hence, you can be sure about your good or bad backlinks.
Now, create a free SEMrush account.

Once the registration is done, go to the dashboard and click on the “Projects” Tab, then “Add your new project.”

Enter your URL in the box and give the project a name. Then click on “Save.”

Under the backlink audit, Click on the Set up.

Now, select the “Root domain” option.

SEMrush will now check your links. It will not take much time to study.

You can also use other tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and SEMrush.

Once it’s done, You will have the list of spam backlinks.

Select all unwanted links by clicking on the “Toxic” tab.

Then click “CSV” to download a .cvs file of the unwanted links.

Copy the links and save them in a document to use on Google’s Disavow Tool later.

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How to Disavow Backlinks With Google’s Disavow Tool ?

Google designed it very simple to use. Before you go ahead to use Google Disavow Tool, you should have a list of bad backlinks prepared.

If you have thousands of domains in the disavow domain list, just remove the duplicates in the Excel sheet before proceeding further. Make sure to save the extracted URL or domain file. If you need to update it in the future, it is easier to do it in Excel than in Notepad.

Now open the Notepad and paste the URLs or domains list from the Excel disavow sheet. If you are disavowing URLs and domains, the text file looks like the above one.

Firstly, Visit the Google Disavow Tool.

Select the site you want to use and click “Disavow Links.”

Again, the Google will give the warning. No need to worry about that, ignore that warning.

Click “Choose file” and select the correct .txt file with the bad backlinks.

Then click on “Submit.”

It’s Done! Google will review your request, and those links should have been declared spam in a few days.

FAQs About Google’s Disavow Tool and Unwanted Backlinks

Conclusion

Every website owner should be familiar with this tool. You can remove the backlinks that are harmful to your website. Your website may be improved in ranking, and users can find you easily on search engines. Hopefully, You understand why you should disavow backlinks and when to do it.