Scroll back a few years and I blogged about the frustration of wearing a white link-building hat in marketplace dominated by black hats. Google hadn’t yet worked out how to stamp-out the burgeoning practice of link buying and exchanging, and instead fought-back by simply mudding the rules of engagement.
With the addition of Google’s new Disavow Links Tool things changed (more on this later), but let’s look back at the conversation running through many SEO’s mind:
Optimiser: What exactly is black hat link building?
Google: It’s the use of any techniques which violate our quality guidelines.
Optimiser: Does this include buying links to improve your website’s rankings?
Google: Of course it does, stupid
Optimiser: So how come all the top ranking sites in my sector have zillions of backlinks? A blind man could see that see they’ve been spending money.
Google: Errr… we haven’t quite figured that one out yet. You see if we penalise websites with paid links then webmasters could just pay for some links to point to their competitors, and get them penalised. But we will find a way soon enough.
Optimiser: OK, but in the meantime how am I supposed to compete wearing a white hat?
Google: Sticky content, link baiting, press release, you know the type of thing.
Optimiser: But surely elaborate link baiting campaigns and submitting expensive press releases is tantamount to buying links?
Google: Errr… you might have a point there, can we get back to you on this one?
Optimiser: How about I wear a grey hat instead, and convince you guys that it is actually white?
Google: No comment…
Except Google did comment and boy did they have a lot to say Google’s webmaster central blog announced the launch of the new Disavow Links Tool back in 2012, complete with an idiot-proof video from spam fighter in-chief Matt Cutts.
The Disavow Links Tool is part of a drive by Google to get webmasters to sanitise their back-link profile. Google began by emailing webmasters (via webmaster tools) with suspicious looking back-links and asked them to remove any ‘fishy’ links. Clearly there’s a Pengiun at work here.
If you’ve been fingered by Google you’ll need to take action, and that means walking away from link exchanges and removing any paid links. The Disavow Links Tool is intended to help you negate the effects of those pesky links that are harder to remove and that includes malicious linkspam.
The Disavow Links Tool itself sits in Google Webmaster Tools and is straightforward to use; simply upload a file with the links included. But is it a good idea? Firstly if you haven’t been flagged there’s nothing to worry about, so you can exhale deeply.
However, if you are in Google’s sights, what should you do? The difficulty is that determining which links are toxic is very tricky business, and you could easily end-up throwing out the SEO baby with the bathwater.
Perhaps it would be best to start by addressing Penguin’s concerns, and you may find there’s no need to use the Disavow Links Tool. Revisit all your back-links and remove anything that could look questionable to a search engine spider, paying special attention to keyword-based anchor text and sidebar/ footer links. Rinse and repeat.
