Have you heard about the Google Disavow tool? Do you understand how to use it? If the rank your website has on search engines for your Fremont business is important, learning about Disavow can help the ranking.

Part of the reason webmasters and those who own websites are interested in Disavow is because their websites were recently penalized because of bad link building skills. Disavow allows the website owner or webmaster to locate backlinks that caused the penalties and gives them a way to disavow them en masse. The hope is that by disavowing the bad backlinks, the website will gain back some of the ground it lost due to the penalties.

When you log into the Google Webmaster’s Tools and choose the Disavow  tool, it will provide the following information:

“If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-qualitylinks you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn’t enough.”

You may learn more about the Disavow tool by signing into your Google account and then going to this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en.

Please be aware that Google does not recommend using the Disavow feature because it could adversely affect your website. Google continues to explain that you should only disavow any backlinks that you consider to be spammy, of low quality or they are artificial in nature. If you are not confident these backlinks are causing problems with your website’s ranking on search engines, it is better to leave the backlinks as they are.

Some website owners and businesses are hoping to reduce the effects of the recent Penguin and Panda updates. Since these two are part of the new Google algorithms for ranking your website on search engines for Fremont businesses, it is most likely that these automatic reductions of website ranking won’t be corrected by the Disavow feature but they could help. The Disavow tool was designed to combat links which violate Google’s Quality Guidelines and these penalties are manually derived rather than automatic.

• Before you start disavowing links, try removing them first. This will clean up the website for the next time it is crawled by search engines.
• Use a source that will gather your current links. Google has a Latest Links report as part of its Webmaster Tools.
• Determine which links are bad or of low quality. Then remove those links manually by sending out emails to any link source to request that they remove the links. This process could take a bit of time.
• Keep track of any links you have requested to be removed and whether or not they have been. Keeping documentation will also let Google know you are making an effort to correct the bad links.
• Choose whether to Disavow individual links or an entire domain. If a website has linked to yours and they have failed to respond to your request to remove their links, you can Disavow the entire URL which will often provide you with the results you need.
• Be sure to use the correct format when submitting URLs. The file should be .txt only and must be “encoded UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII” to be accepted.

Is the Disavow tool something you should use to increase your website on search engines for Fremont businesses? It may be helpful, but chances are it would be better to manually remove the offending links and then build quality links that Google will accept to see your site rankings increase.