Disavow Your Toxic Links with Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools and Link Detox

One of the standard practices for optimizing websites and gaining a good page rank and in the top search results of Google, was to create links that point from other sites to your site and indicate to Google crawlers that your site contains good quality content. In the past, this has led to a variety of linking practices that were intended to trick the crawlers by using low quality link schemes or purchasing links from unknown sources in order to artificially boost the rank of websites that have low quality content. However, earlier this year, in order to try and eliminate these fake sources of links, With the latest Google algorithm update, Google penalized websites with poor quality links pointing to them. In some cases, this led to significant falls in the PageRank and the ranking of many websites all starting with Google sending “unnatural link notices” in their Google webmaster tools accounts.

Naturally, webmasters were upset that they had been penalized, often for bad links that they thought were good. Many corporate websites that had been poorly managed by their web designers also felt the pinch, even though their owners had no idea that they had purchased links or had connections to schemes like link farm websites. The only solution for many webmasters has been to meticulously go through all of the links on their website, in some cases several thousand of them, and find and delete the bad ones. But all this is now history with the release of a new Google webmaster tool that allows users to disavow links that have been identified as being low quality and for which they have been penalized.

The new Google Disavow Links Tool allows users to upload a text file that contains the links that have been harming their website’s PageRank, and Google will stop considering their influence when they calculate your PageRank. As this service is currently limited to a single source domain, it is the tool of last resort and webmasters should try every other method available to them for removing the links before they use this new tool.

A great place to begin the search for poor quality links is to use the “Links to Your Site”  feature in Google webmaster tools. Choose the relevant website address and then follow this path: Traffic > Links to Your Site > Who links the most > More, and download the latest CSV file of link addresses.  This will allow you to examine all of the links to your website so that you can start to eliminate the good quality links, as a way to reveal the links that you want to disavow.

Since the release of Google’s Penguin algorithm update, there have been a number of new services that have come onto the market to make finding these bad links easier. Services like Link Detox , allow users to locate bad links with a few simple mouse clicks and makes it easier for webmasters and website owners to find which of their links is harmful and why This tool is available for an exchange of a tweet post or only $1 per site. This is probably more a cost effective solution than looking through the links manually. In addition to cleaning up your bad links, Link Detox will monitor the new links that point back to your website to make sure that the penalties don’t come back in the future.

In order to check if your site has been affected by the latest Google algorithm update, login into your Google webmaster tools,  select your site and check  for any notifications. If your site’s PageRank has been affected due to poor quality links, go to link detox and find the links that have harmed your site. Thanks to Link Detox and Google Webmaster tools we are closer to a healthy PageRank. If you are still having difficulties and you need help. Feel free to contact us.

p.s. I am not affiliated with the Link Detox Product, I am just a fan.