At Sozpic we’re against “not-so-transparent” and fraudulent techniques when we take on a web positioning project. Peace of mind is worth more than shortcuts, since it’s unacceptable to see your website sitting on page 34 of Google’s results because of poor SEO management.

The reasons are clear: Google is dedicating a lot of effort and resources to fighting webspam. Traditionally, SEO experts and/or spammers have used the same excuse: “I can’t control the links pointing to my website, so links from suspicious sites can never penalize me”, and that was true up to a point. Today, Google has rolled out a tool to disavow links pointing to your website. First of all, I want to make clear that under normal circumstances there’s no need to use this tool. The reasons you might consider using it are: because you’ve received a warning message from Google, because you’ve been penalized by the latest version of Google Penguin, or because you’re being attacked through “bad SEO”. Below, we’ll look at each of these:

You’ve noticed a significant drop since the latest Google Penguin algorithm update.

April 24, 2012, the date Google launched its “Google Penguin” algorithm, which aggressively went after every offender: everyone who had built networks with the sole purpose of fraudulent link building, using anchor texts designed purely to profit from fake links. If this was done artificially and you’re aware of it, the best thing you can do is try to invalidate those links, not only because they can affect your search engine rankings, but also to avoid tarnishing your brand’s image by being associated with a site considered spam. If you can’t resolve the problem, Google’s new tool can be very useful.

You’re suffering a “negative SEO” attack.

Certain companies or organizations carry out what’s known as “negative SEO”, which consists of placing links on a series of fraudulent websites with anchor text designed to associate you with unwanted keywords. With a detailed analysis, we can examine the anchor text and determine where that attack is coming from.

Instructions for using the tool

The system is very similar to robots.txt: it’s simply a text document that indicates where you don’t want to receive links from. As with any interpreted machine language, the hash symbol (#) is used for comments.

In the document, we’ll need to indicate whether we want to “disavow” a link or an entire domain. Example:

As you can see, one link is used per line; if the goal is to disavow an entire domain, you need to prefix it with “domain:” before the domain in question.

Step 1: Go to the link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Step 2: Select the website you want to work on. Step 3: Select the .txt file mentioned above and upload it.

Step 4: Whenever you want to make a change to it, you’ll need to download it, edit it, and upload it again.

Conclusions

Although this is an extremely powerful tool that will change many concepts once thought to be certain, you need to be extremely careful with it and do nothing if you’re not sure whether you need it or how to use it, since it can seriously harm your domain. Obviously, identifying harmful links requires a careful audit. Depending on how you intend to use it, you’ll follow one procedure or another, which we’ll refine in future articles.