You can now deny/disavow spammy links to your site using the long awaited Google Disavow Links Tool found in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Negative SEOs, start your engines and get ready to do some damage because Matt Cutts just announced Google’s new Disavow Links tool at Pubcon 2012 Vegas. The reason I’m telling negative SEOs to start their engines because this signals a new change in upcoming algorithm updates that will open new doors for SEOs to attack their competitors by building thousands of spammy links to their sites. It used to be that ANY link was a good link and there was no such as a bad one; worst case scenario was that the link had no value but it wouldn’t hurt you. This being said, the SEO world changed forever last April 24th when Google launched the Penguin update which, was a set of algorithms that mostly targeted off-page SEO aka link building. Shortly after this, they sent over 700,000 unnatural link messages letting select webmasters know that they have identified suspicious activity in their links profile. Many people call this Matt Cutts’ Phishing expedition, trying to get webmasters to tell on themselves. Anyways, the point is that now bad links can hurt your site’s ability to rank well and now negative SEOs can wreak havoc.
“There’s been a little bit of a brouhaha in the last few months about people wanting to clean up their backlinks. But if you’re an average mom and pop doing normal sorts of things and nothing that’s egregious or aggressive SEO, this is not a tool you should need to use.” – Google’s Matt Cutts
Is The New Disavow Links Tool a Scam?
My guess is yes. This tool will be a complete flop!!! The reason is because if bad links could hurt a website, I could easily build spammy links to my top competitors and overtake them in the search engines. As my featured image shows above, I believe this is just a phishing campaign to get people to tell on themselves and reveal link farms and other blackhat backlink techniques.
At the time of posting this blog, the tool is brand new but I assure you I will not be using it. Nor do I recommend this for any of my clients or readers. I have never engaged in a “negative SEO” campaign which, is when you sabotage competition but if this tool actually works, I may start building spammy backlinks to all the websites who are outranking me to take that #1 spot!
I’ve worked on websites that bring in millions of dollars each week and if someone was able to simply build spammy backlinks to our website and knock us down in the SERPs, we’d literally have to lay people off, downsize or maybe even go bankrupt. But Google is not that sloppy nor that stupid and therefore, I believe this new disavow links tool is just a phishing scam.
How Effective Will The Disavow Links Tool Be?
My guess is that there will be a review process before Google actually accepts your disavowment and during that time your site can suffer but even before you had the chance to use the tool, those links were there anyways so you only stand to lose ground by using it. Unlike negative SEO where someone can be attacking you from outside your organization, this tool can only be accessed in your verified Webmaster Console so this means you have to tell on yourself. Even if the tool does work, using it will hurt your rankings in the meantime and you will have to build new high quality links to catch up.
Instead, if you feel like you have bad backlinks holding you back, it might be a safer and smarter technique to just build more high quality links to make up for it and leave this tool alone.
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