A complete and comprehensive guide on how to use Google Disavow Link Option

This is guest post by Michael Evans
So, your website has been tanked by the vicious penguin and even after giving your hundred percent to get rid of the spammy links that are making your website bleed, a vast majority of them remain there intact and making your feel totally helpless. But fear not dude, the disavow link is here and hopefully it is going to exonerate you from the sins of your past spammy marketing initiatives that might have probably cost you thousands of SEO dollars. Yeah, yeah it is not that easy otherwise we could have had innumerable number of success stories to share by now. As there is no such great news to relish, we can safely assume that not many people have got benefited from it but that does not necessarily mean that it is not that effective. Nope, probably you do not exactly know how and when to use it [no offense plz]. So, here it goes –

A Little bit of background story

There has been a bit of confusion surrounding the concept of Disavow Link. The building block of web is links; no amount of spam can undo this. So just because a search engine named Google has launched something called – Disavow Link, it does not mean that you should be giving less attention to acquiring links naturally and put all your efforts to monitor and police each and every link that comes along the way and get them down just to be in the good book of Google.

Actually, the concept of online marketing has been hijacked by some shrewd marketers who have been engaged in doing sneaky things to get to the top in some competitive keywords in no time. They were using bulk article submissions, article network sites, massive directory submission and other sneaky stuffs. So, Google has to intervene and now we have got penguin update. But as negative SEO is on the rise and as Google is working on the biggest ever penguin algo update [as news is doing the round], it launches Disavow Link option so that it can avoid the scathing criticism of the webmasters whose websites might be wrongly affected by the upcoming algo shuffle.
Who should be using this tool: As Google is reiterating the fact that this is an advance tool and average webmasters need not have to use this because if used wrongly, it could back fire. So, here are the few hypothetical situations when you should be thinking about giving the Disavow Link a try:

1. Your website has been manually penalized

It sucks when you receive a message in Google webmaster tool about violating Google’s policy or about Link Scheme. But do not jump at the gun at the sight of this message. This message only means that your website is manually checked by human quality raters at Google and they have raised their flag after checking the backlink profile of your website.

However, this does not mean that you need to remove all the links and turn the clock around. Nope, do not make such foolish thing because you will just be shooting yourself in the feet. You need to create a list as mentioned below:

URL	PR	Anchor text	Moz rank	Type	Content Quality
Example.com	2	Exact matched	20	blog	Poor quality
Socialbookmark.com	1	Long tail	30	Social bookmark	NA

Create an excel file just like above. Add column like – PR, anchor text, Type of website, quality of the content, number of outbound links, Moz etc. You are free to add more columns. When you are done with this you need to figure out which links are affecting your website and which links are adding value to your website. Try to remove as many bad links pointing to your website as possible before, you send a reconsideration request. When you are done with this, the time is up for the Disavow links option.

Select the website you want to apply this Disavow link option.


Click on the red button and it will then ask you to upload a txt file containing list of sites that you wish to disavow.


The format of the text is plain and simple. All you got to do is to create a txt file and it may look like the following -

#This is spammy website, I do want to disaow links coming from this site:
domain:littlespammywebsite.com

#This article directory sucks, I asked them to remove the links, but they did not

Text starting with # will be comment and Google will not be taken into consideration. If you wish to discard all the links coming from a single website, you can use the following parameter – domain:websitename.com .

Just make sure that you are keeping the file short. It should not be more than 2MB.

Just want to reterate that if your website is affected by manual penalty, you need to do both, try Disavow Link option and wait few weeks before sending another reconsideration request.

2. Your website is affected by penguin algorithm

If you saw that the traffic of your website took a plunge after a penguin refresh, you need to clean up the mess as much as possible. Do a background check of the links as I have mentioned above before using the Disavow link option. Since your website has got caught by algorithm update, you need to wait for weeks or probably for months until another penguin refresh goes live.

3. You are a victim of Negative SEO 

Sometimes, it might happen that your competitors are doing all they could to hamper the growth of your business. They may be doing sneaky things for your website like – spammy directory submissions, article submissions etc without your being aware of it. In that case, rather than wasting your time and money on trying to get rid of those links, you should be using this tool to make Google aware of the fact that you are not responsible for the crap links built by your competitors.
I am happy to share this information. Let me know how fare with these tips.

About Guest Blogger

Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he is a regular contributor of Site2You.com. He has written several articles on how to topics like - how to make a website etc in his writing career.