Last week Google’s Chief Engineer Matt Cutts has introduced the much anticipated Google Disavow Links Tool which is now available to all webmasters through Google’s Webmaster Tools service.
It’s a follow up to Google’s unnatural links messages sent earlier this year triggered by the evidence of paid links, link exchanges or other link-related schemes violating their quality guidelines.
Google’s Disavow Tool allows webmasters to disavows web addresses linked or pointed to one’s website which is considered malicious or spammy in nature. That action in fact attempts to inform Google about links and sites that one wish to be disregarded from the current link building profile.
Google PageRank system primarily relies on natural links, formulating its basis for page rankings which means that it uses links between pages to help a search engine determine what web pages are reputable, informative and relevant to most end users.
Google has been advising uses to manually remove spammy and/or lower quality links from affected websites as soon as possible however website owners who struggle remove the links completely are now advised to make use of the new Disavow Links Tool.
As explained by Cutts, Google Disavow Links Tool works by allowing a website owner to upload a text file of the one’s ignored links, with one URL per line which may describe either a full domain or single web page. Google promises then to review and consider the untrustworthy set of links which may result in a website regaining some of the lost rankings slowly, however that process can take several weeks.
Summarising, it’s great that there is now a tool which can help deal with spammy links, at the same time it looks like Google will gather a very comprehensive database of spammy websites so be careful of “bad neighbourhoods” when working on your back link profile.