Examples of industry authorities often targeted by less reputable websites for backlinks include Associations, Unions, Universities, Fraternal Organizations, Charities and NGOs.
Low scoring website backlinks to your website come with a potential “Google Penalty Risk” that will often reduce your website effectiveness. There is also real potential less reputable websites may try gain the upper-hand on your constituents by placing your domain throughout their website. Examples of industry authorities often targeted by less reputable websites for backlinks include Associations, Unions, Universities, Fraternal Organizations, Charities and NGOs.
Let’s Look at an Example
As a real world example, a recent review of a mid-sized and leading industry authority Association showed they had nearly 1.2 million current backlinks spanning 6,738 domains on 4,432 IP addresses. Pretty impressive but to be expected for an industry leading Association! All this good news, however, was tainted a little because our enterprise SEO system identified 601 low-quality, potentially “spammy” websites linking back to them. After a brief consultation and a decision on where to draw the line on the “Google Penalty Risk” however, our client was pleased to see how easy it is to disavow unwanted backlinks.
What is Google Disavow?
This is where the Google Disavow tool comes into play. The Google Disavow tool allows website owners to inform Google about any low-quality or “spammy” backlinks they want to disassociate from their website. Like many other Google tools, this tool is free to consumers .
Get a Professional Assessment
Before utilizing Google Disavow, it is crucial that you can accurately assess the difference between positive backlinks which you want and the low-quality backlinks you don’t. John Consulting uses an enterprise Edition of a top SEO analysis tool to conduct these audits and provide a complete list of all of your linkbacks with the “Google Penalty Risk” percentage listed for each. We will provide guidance and best practices to determine what is the best cutoff risk level appropriate for your organization. Typically we recommend immediate removal of the websites carrying the highest penalty risk and have an internal resource evaluate the marginal backlinks before disavowing them with Google.
Using Google Disavow
With a list of domain backlinks you are sure you want disavow, you can quickly copy & paste the domains into a plain text file (.txt) format. Each URL should be on a separate line. You can also use domain-level disavowal by including the entire domain preceded by “domain:” (e.g., “domain:example.com”).
To upload the disavow file, visit the Google Disavow tool page (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main) within the Google Search Console. Select your website from the dropdown menu and click on the “Disavow Links” button. Follow the instructions to upload the disavow file you created. Once you’ve submitted the disavow file, Google will consider it as a strong suggestion but not an absolute directive. It may take some time for Google to process the disavowal request, and the impact on your website’s rankings will depend on various factors.
For more detailed information and best practices on using the Google Disavow tool, you can visit Google’s official documentation on disavowing links at the following URL:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487. For more information about our process or pricing for SEO services, please email me directly at: joe@johnconsulting.net and ask about our $490 special on Backlink analysis.
