Disavow Links Tool Launched by Google!

The wait is finally over! SEOs and webmasters around the globe have been waiting for this tool for months and it is finally here. Google has announced the official launch of a new tool to disavow links- which will let webmasters get rid of poor or irrelevant or disreputable links to their site quite easily. This tool gives webmasters and SEOs the much needed instrument to protect their sites from being penalized by the Penguin update, which was rolled out in April this year and targets webspam.

The tool has been long anticipated since Matt Cutts spoke about it. And now, speaking at the Pubcon conference, Matt Cutts formally announced the tool’s launch. SEOs can try the tool from here.

Google’s tool comes in more than 3 months after Bing launched its Disavow links tool- a big surprise at the time because Google has just begun speculating about it- and within a few days, Bing launched the tool.

How to Use the Disavow Tool

Google has said that format requires the URLs to be listed in a text file from a specific site using domain: format- eg- domain:google.com

Then this is how Google advices to move ahead:

“An excerpt of a valid file might look like the following:
# Contacted owner of spamdomain1.com on 7/1/2012 to 
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:spamdomain1.com
# Owner of spamdomain2.com removed most links, but missed these
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentA.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentB.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentC.html

In this example, lines that begin with a pound sign (#) are considered comments and Google ignores them. The “domain:” keyword indicates that you’d like to disavow links from all pages on a particular site (in this case, “spamdomain1.com”). You can also request to disavow links on specific pages (in this case, three individual pages on spamdomain2.com). We currently support one disavowal file per site and the file is shared among site owners in Webmaster Tools. If you want to update the file, you’ll need to download the existing file, modify it, and upload the new one. The file size limit is 2MB.”

The links will be disavowed in some time- roughly several weeks. Google has added that it may not use the submissions if it finds them untrustworthy. Also, Matt Cutts said that the ideal route for webmasters would be to initially try to remove the links by asking the webmasters of the sites to remove them and only then use the disavow tool.

Great News for Penguin Hit Sites

This tool will be a huge help to webmasters hoping to revive their sites after the Penguin update. The update came down upon sites with spammy links pointing to them and this led to a widespread panic among SEOs about negative SEO. The frequent link warnings released by Google were also adding to the pressure. That is why this tool will now help SEOs get control of their sites once again. This is what Matt Cutts says about the tool:

What do you think of the tool? Will you use it? Do share your views.