Google Disavow Tool Released – We Tested It!
Following the announcement at PubCon that Google have made their "New and Improved Link Disavow" tool open to the masses, we feel that it is about time that we shared our experience with the tool after being asked to be one of the Beta testers of the disallow link platform, while also passing on our findings and observations.
We have had access to the tool while it was undergoing development and have had the chance to make use and analyse the effect that it has had on the test sites that we used, and although the tool seems to be offering webmasters more control over the websites that they operate, we have a few thoughts that we feel should be brought into discussion, to see what your thoughts and views are over what could be one of the biggest feature releases from Google since their announcement of Webmaster Tools.
With the Link Disavow tool now available through your Webmaster Tools platform, you are now able to shape your backlink profile like you have never experienced before, telling Google that you want them to ignore the negative links while keeping the authoritive equity firmly flowing into your website but is that necessarily a good thing for search engine users?
We wanted to be able to see the tool in action and so forging a plan to run the tool over a test site, we embarked on seeing what this tool was really all about, taking a full backlink analysis of the site that we were focusing on and determining which of the links that we were going to classify as ‘negative' or ‘ineffective', much like millions of webmasters all over the world will be doing today and then seeing what knock on effect the tool would have on the rankings of the site that we were testing.
I think it goes without saying that the Disavow tool is a powerful asset to any website owner and that obviously if Google had failed to secure their tool, it could have had potentially devastating results on the search engine results as we know them, but the requirement to have ‘admin' or ‘owner' status on the webmaster tools platform made sure that only those with authorisation to this level are able to even access the tool, let alone indicate links for removal.
Link Disavow And A Warning From Google

Cutts revealed that the tool is very advanced and strongly recommended that use of the tool should only be done if you know what affect it could have on your site, warning that excessive listing of links could affect the way in which your site performs in the search engine results, basically saying that if you remove all of the links pointing into your site, don't be shocked that the site still doesn't rank in the search engine results as you have no equity.
This warning backs up the comment from Cutts that says that only if you know what you are doing should you use this tool, a warning which is likely to fall on the deaf ears of many as they fight to try to recover from the loss of rankings that their site has had, but we recommend caution when using the tool.
Our Disavow Links Test
As I have already pointed out, we were entrusted into the ‘secret circle' of Beta testers for the Disavow tool and made sure that we had something to report back on and the findings that we experienced will be sure to guide you along your own Disavow experience.
From what we found, the process was simple to follow as long as you were only looking to remove a small number of links, whereas if you’re looking to a site with millions of links that you want to place through the process, you will be looking at a prolonged text file creation period, as you have to be very specific with the links that you want to use.
Having created the document and uploaded it to the Google servers, we pushed a reinclusion request in front of Google, signalling that we had used the tool as well as offering a number of proofs that we had attempted to contact other site owners to have some of those links removed, we then sat back and monitored the site rankings.
Just as had been indicated, the effect was not immediate, nor was it only a matter of days, instead it seemed to take forever and a day, until suddenly one morning we saw that the rankings were back!
Now we are unsure whether this is a coincidence or whether this will be a running occurrence, but the day on which the rankings returned, there was a Google Penguin data refresh… Is there a tie between the two actions? We simply don't know but it seems very likely.
Is The Disavow Tool Just A Link Buyers ‘Get Out Of Jail Free Card'?
The introduction of the Google Disavow tool has been met with a number of concerns from many within the industry and we can see where that concern is coming from as you have to ask yourself whether this is a new exploitable method that would allow site link abusers to flood their sites with low quality links to obtain a high placed ranking only to disavow those links weeks later to avoid penalisation.
The question which has to be asked is whether there will be a limit to the number of instances that Google will allow website owners to make use of this feature or will link sculpting become more evident than it has been ever before.
We have already seen that spammy links within a backlink profile are still providing the power to be able to rank within different niches, with the Pay Day Loans market being one of the most exploited and reported, seeing sites that have no relevance being pumped full of loan related links in a magnitude of formats to climb the rankings and find their place on the first page of the Google search engine results, but this is something that is still to be answered by Google.
In a recent Google Webmaster Tools video which has been released on YouTube, Matt Cutts gives an explanation on the Link Disavow tool, pointing out that the idea behind it is that webmasters are now able to ask Google to discredit links that they are otherwise unable to remove. A short sighted view of the situation in my own personal opinion as it is unlikely that owners are likely to spend the time approaching sites prior to using the tool, but one that could simply be the SEO within thinking about the timescales.
It would be interesting to see whether you guys that are reading this would be willing to undertake the process of emailing website owners to have links removed or whether you would take the newly available shortcut to having the links disavowed? Feel free to let us know in the comments area!
What the Disavow tool means for link tools
With the release of the disavow tool, we can clearly see that the use of link analysis tools such as those seen on LinkResearchTools.com, Ahrefs.com and MajesticSEO.com to name just a few, will increase significantly, making the detection of bad links vital to website owners that are looking to make use of the new disavow feature, so if you aren't currently using any of these tools, we strongly recommend that you jump onto at least one of these to aid your decision making.
Although we can predict that the number of users of such tools will increase, we also believe that there will become an emerging issue which will be trying to figure out which of the links within your backlink profile are considered to be negative within the eyes of Google, although according to the earlier video that we have placed into the article in which Matt Cutts talks about using the tool for sites with unnatural link warnings, it appears that you should be looking at the latest indexed links by Google as it is likely that these are the links that have triggered the warning, so those should be your starting point for removal and inclusion into the disavow tool.
One update which has been made by one of the creators of a tool, LinkResearchTools.com, seems to show that they are now pulling in a mass of new metrics in which to help webmasters identify which of their links could potentially be harming their site via Link Detox, however how close this is to seeing what Google do is still to be seen.
26 Comments
Marie Haynes - http://www.mytrafficdropped.com
Thanks so much for sharing this! Just for clarification…did you run this test on a site that had previously received an unnatural links warning? Or do you think it was a Penguin hit site?
Alex Graves
Hi Marie,
Yeah the test was conducted on a site that had received an unnatural link warning message, however we saw that the effect of the use of the tool actioned as the penguin update happened, as I say it could have been coincidence but we believe that there is some relation to the data refresh happening at the same time.
Thanks for your question
Kevin
Did you receive a reply to the reconsideration request ? I’m guessing it was “no manual spam actions – found”.
Alex Graves
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the question!
On sending in the re-consideration request we received a message that told us that they had processed the request but it was quite generic and we didn’t get much information from the message.
The message that you seem to be asking about relates more to an automatic penalty which could be anything from Panda to Penguin, so if that is the message that you are receiving, i would start to look more towards those updates rather than thinking that you have a link penalty at this moment in time.
Hope that helps.
jim
Hey guys good article but I have a question. After you give the list of links, do you have to do a reinclusion request to see any impact on your site?
Alex Graves
Hi Jim,
Yeah we made sure that we had conducted some link removals ourselves to show a willing and effort to remove links that were pointing into the site and then used the tool to indicate those that we couldn’t remove, followed by placing a re-inclusion request into Google with all the information that we could provide.
We advise that you inform Google that you have used the Disavow tool within that request as it will help the person that will be viewing it to understand that you have a list of links or domains that you would like to be discounted and should help them to speed up the process.
Good luck!
Ricky Shah - http://geniusgeeks.com
This is a great news indeed. Can you be more specific here?
“Just as had been indicated, the effect was not immediate, nor was it only a matter of days, instead it seemed to take forever and a day, until suddenly one morning we saw that the rankings were back!”
Yesterday, I tried the same feature for my client’s website to remove some spammy backlinks created by earlier SEO company. Many of them were sitewide links and had no control on it. It would be of great assistance if you could reveal how many days/weeks it took you to see your ranking soaring sky high.
Matt Cutts did mention that it takes weeks to reflect the same.
Alex Graves
Hi Ricky,
Following the use of the Disavow tool we did see a couple of weeks pass, however the recovery of rankings began on the same day that a penguin data refresh happened. We can not confirm that this is going to be the way in which to tool operates as we have only witnessed it on the test site at the moment but I guess that we will be able to see what happens on the next penguin refresh as we are tracking a few other sites to see whether they recover on the same timescale.
Google have said that it will take time for them to be able to see the notifications that the tool creates within their index, so it could just be that the timescale ran side by side with the data refresh…
Andrew - http://www.cozy-digital.co.uk/
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the insight in your post, as with all these new features it’s great to have a heads up regarding their usage.
I was wondering if you could assist with my query. Once links have been uploaded through the disavow tool and Google has updated its index ,are the links still included in Webmaster tools when you download links to CSV? Or is this data updated to reflect the links that are no longer being counted?
I’d really appreciate your feedback on this point if you can.
Alex Graves
Hi Andrew,
Sorry for the delay in response on this, been that busy with getting further testing done etc that I seem to have overlooked a few of the questions on here!
Anyway, in regards to your question… I’m not completely sure to be honest as the links were still showing in WMT but we know that their reporting is delayed considerably so we can’t get an accurate picture of this just yet.
An interesting question and one that I will be sure to have a look into…
Thanks
Google’s Disavow Tool - pingback
[…] wish I could tell you. Dave Naylor’s blog has the only report I’ve seen of a possibly successful disavowal (his team apparently beta-tested the tool), but the evidence is indirect. This is one of the main […]
Harsh Agrawal - http://www.shoutmeloud.com
I have reported close to 7K link for one of my blog (http://Wphostingdiscount.com)..where a spammer used some automated tool to create thousands of Spam links via Forums….
Good thing is all links were created for just one page and I used ahrefs to find all links and reported it..Now waiting to see the results…
Alex Graves
Harsh,
I would consider reviewing the way that you comment onto sites too as you might not be aware that your link has been made into a hyperlink which are no follow on here, so would maybe look at trying to get some of those removed too as it is likely to be viewed as comment spam if placed across a number of sites…
James Gurd - http://digitaljuggler.com
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the write up.
Do you not think that the disavow tool is really Google’s attempt to get link quality checking done on the cheap? Over time it will build up a body of evidence of URLs and domains that are being reported for low quality linking. It will detect trends and identify persistent offenders. This will enable it to ‘punish’ what it considers to be low quality domains and perhaps even ignore any link from those domains regardless of what domain it is linking to, or the context of that link.
For Google the manual cost of policing linking is huge. Flipping the model and getting all of us to disavow links gives them free insight into the sources of poor linking. I think it’s a classic Google move – give people the tools, get them to do the work for you.
That doesn’t mean I don’t see the benefit of the disavow tool, I certainly do. I just don’t think Google’s drive for implementing it comes from wanting to protect genuine SEOs/web owners, more from self-protection. If the net benefit is strengthening the hands of SEO, then great.
What do you think?
Thanks
james
Alex Graves
Great question James and one that has been asked to me a couple of times to be honest.
The thing with this is that Google have already had their voice on this matter passed into the public knowledge via Matt Cutts, who said that Google were not looking at using the data that they collect from this process, at least not just yet.
Yes that does look like they are collating the information but at the moment they have bigger issues to work with from what i can see in the search results across a number of niches.
You have to ask yourself, if you were getting all of this data that people are submitting, would you look to place a link on any of those sites that are showing up frequently?
The issue with this data is that we are manually policing our own links, so there will be a number of good links that will find their way into these disavow lists as people that have less insight into what could be a potentially bad link flood their file with as many links they can find and submit it to Google.
What we would also have to consider is, would Google depending on this form of data to punish and remove sites from their index be exploited by people submitting strong sites within their lists even though they don’t have a link on there?
Guess only time will tell…
Biraju Shah - http://www.websquash.com
Hi,
Another excellent opportunity given by Google to clean up and safeguard, though not really sure how actually it is gonna impact on the results. There are a few confusions still though, am sure there’s more coming to the rescue 🙂
Thanks
Biraju
manishak - http://www.tipsonhairremoval.com
Non- SEO people like me are still in a dilemma whether to use the disavow tool or not. If things go awry, whatever rankings we have will spiral down!
Alex Graves
Hi Manishak,
Yeah that is the problem with the tool and one that Matt Cutts has warned people about, saying that if you don’t know how to use the tool… Don’t!
If you are unable to work out what links are potentially bad for your site and simply throw all your links into the file, you would be about to see your domain stripped of everything that you have worked for.
Good luck
Jake
Hi there, and thanks for the great article.
We’ve been badly hit by Penguin and have the disavow file ready to go.
My question is – do we still have to file a reconsideration request even if we didn’t get an unnatural links warning?
We filed a recon request when Penguin first hit, and were told we didn’t have a manual penalty.
Many thanks, Jake
Alex Graves
Hi Jake,
The comments that Matt Cutts made about this situation is that as you did not receive the link warning, the penalisation of your site will be an automatic reaction to something triggered within their algorithms, so a re-inclusion request would not help you.
If you know that you have been hit in Penguin then you can now ask yourself what could have triggered that, look to clean up those issues and make use of the disavow tool without pushing for a re-inclusion request.
If you have been hit by Penguin and have managed to sort out the issue, you should see the site return once Google update their Penguin data again, however if you don’t recover then there will still be issues that you need to address before the next data refresh to bounce back.
Good luck!
Google’s Disavow Tool – Take a Deep Breath | Cheryl Pierce - pingback
[…] I wish I could tell you. Dave Naylor’s blog has the only report I’ve seen of a possibly successful disavowal (his team apparently beta-tested the tool), but the evidence is indirect. This is one of the main […]
Steven Forsyth
Just one question, is there any way to confirm that a link you sent in has in fact been disavowed? The link remains active so how can I confirm that Google has looked at it and discounted it? Do any of the tools such as ahrefs or majestic show the links as lost even tho they still exist? I don’t want to submit a reconsideration until I am sure the links have already been disavowed.
Caryn
Hi Alex-
Our competitor used a negative SEO and created a lot of bad backlinks (many of them don’t point to our website) within the last month. We have never created bad links in the past.
Should we submit a complete list of these links (including no-follow) to Google Disavow tool immediately? What else can we do in this situation?
Thank you
Tomas Rawicky
How to disallow links from all .tk domains? domain:tk ?
Fionn Downhill - http://www.elixirinteractive.com
I am not buying it. We also removed links for a site that got penguinized and the site came back by itself. I feel that since you were a beta they may have given your project more attention or indeed the site came back because you took corrective action. I would not use this tool maybe if a site was targetted maliciously and I felt it had a negative effect on the rankings AND I could prove it I might but thats it.
Ramon - http://www.seo-translator.com
I would say that this tool should be used with extreme caution – even Google highlights that. You may inadvertently remove a lot of valuable links. And I get the impression that there is no “undo” feature… so once you have disallowed a link you can never allow it back?