There are 2 main types of unnatural links. Links you made yourself and the links you didn’t. If you didn’t make any of the links then you don’t need to worry about manual actions for unnatural links, and you very probably don’t need to ever use the disavow tool. If you have a manual action for “a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages” then you will very probably need to use the disavow tool to clean up the links you commissioned or made yourself.
A lot of Google penalties (called “manual actions” by Google) are aimed at industrial-strength-manipulation of either Google’s popularity, reputation or relevance reward systems, which it relies on to create SERPs (search engine results pages) – and MOST smaller businesses won’t have come across the challenges caused by unnatural links (unless they paid an SEO company in the past to ‘promote’ them using industrial-strength-manipulation such as low-quality link building).
Artificial backlinks
However, if you have been competing in your niche for positions using artificial backlinks – chances are, you are affected.
Google has made a lot of noise in the past (circa 2012-2017) about unnatural, manipulative or artificial links pointing at your site so you cannot simply ignore them. Google has chosen NOT to ignore your links anymore if they detect a REAL-TIME INTENT to rank for specific keywords using lower quality means – or link schemes, in other words. My primary interest is SEO for real business websites, and this post is about something that’s probably going to hit a lot of businesses that, in the past, promoted their site using low-quality SEO services – resulting in unnatural links, which in turn can lead to a perceived increased risk of ‘negative SEO‘.
Google undeniably is taking a softer approach to low-quality backlinks than in previous years. It seems to me they are more interested in real-time spamming than historic link building activities. If you haven’t been building links, you probably have next-to-nothing to worry about. I think it is inferred by Google if are involved in real-time web spamming you are still in danger of a manual action, drop in traffic and a merry-go-round of time-wasted in areas with little ROI for your business. Historic link building activity may be less of a concern though.
What Happens To Your Rankings In Google If Google Penalises Your Site For Unnatural Links?
- If you receive a manual action it’s clean-up time.
- Your rankings are probably going to be very noticeably negatively impacted.
- Other times the indicators might be more subtle.
- You might not rank at all in Google for something you used to rank for very well for.
- Your traffic might reduce month by month.
- You might disappear overnight for valuable keywords associated with your content.
- You might disappear for one keyword phrase.
- You might be reviewed, manually
- Fresh content seems to struggle a bit more to get into Google’s index
If you are, indeed, penalised, you’re going to have clean your links up if you want to restore your ‘reputation’ in Google. Penalties can last a long time (if no clean-up is undertaken). In the very worst cases – your site and all its pages can be removed from Google. It can be ‘de-indexed‘ and a ‘pure spam‘ classification. When you get a penalty revoked, things start to get back to normal, but this process takes time too.
Will Disavowing Backlinks To Your Website Help Google Trust Your Backlinks More?
Maybe.
I have approached this over the years that yes, at some point in the process of a chain of events that leads to your rankings, a disavow file can lead to Google trusting your site more. If Google labels links for a manual reviewer so that “they would know that someone or the webmaster or content owner is actively tackling those links” then it is still useful (for some) to disavow risky links (however you quantify that) but for most webmasters, it may be the case that Google is already ‘discarding ‘ and devaluing your lowest-quality links anyway.
I went ‘full disclosure’ on my own backlink profile using the disavow file in 2012 and it helped me in the long-run both to get record traffic levels, top rankings and to recover quickly from a negative SEO hack and multiple negative SEO attacks. I always treated the disavow file as something that would be manually reviewed at some point. I’d lean towards focusing on other things than spending a lot of time on managing a disavow file (unless you are at real risk of ‘real-time’ penalty or have a manual action for unnatural links).
If you have sorted all other site quality issues out, I would then disavow low-quality links in case it has some second-order benefit down the road. The Disavow Links Tool is a tool provided by Google in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). You can specify which domains you want to disavow the links from (you can also specify individual pages). Generally speaking, if disavowing a link, you are better of disavowing the entire domain (if it is a spammy domain).
How to submit the disavow file?
The disavow.txt is just a simple text file with the following list of domains e.g.:
domain:google.com
domain: plus.google.com
The way it appears to work is you tell Google which links to ignore when are calculating the quality of your backlinks. Some might recommend removing links instead of just using this disavow tool from Google. Lots of people have different angles. I have used BOTH methods to recover sites from manual actions and algorithmic penalties.
If you have a manual penalty, you will probably also need to get some of these links physically removed or at least try and get them removed. Yes, that means emailing Webmasters and keeping a record of that endeavour. If you get a manual penalty, have lots of links and removing the low-quality links is going to be a hard task – you WILL need to employ the disavow file.
How To Use the Backlinks Disavow Tool?
I have in the past proactively disavowed links it on sites that are obviously algorithmically penalised for particular keywords or on links I expect will cause a problem later on. One would expect penalties are based on algorithmic detection on some level for some sites. If you’ve ever attempted to manipulate Google, now’s the time to at least quantify the risk attached to those links. I recommend you go that one step further and consider disavowing very low-quality links YOU HAVE MADE pointing to your site, as:
- Google is better at identifying your low-quality links.
- Google already knows about your crap links.
- Google is very definitely ignoring most of your links.
- Google has probably already has penalised you in areas and you probably are not aware of it. I’ve helped a few sites that got the unnatural links message that was clearly algorithmically slapped a year before and never noticed it until it started to hurt.
- Some competitors will ‘negative SEO‘ your website (I go into this below).
Upload a list of links to disavow:
- Go to the disavow links tool page.
- Select your website.
- Click Disavow links.
- Click Choose File.
In short – if you are using unnatural links to get top positions and don’t deserve them Google will nuke your site when it detects them. Google knows which keywords to penalise you for to destroy your ability to attract useful organic visits. Sometimes this happens on a keyword level, sometimes page-by-page – sometimes site-by-site! The important thing to realise is there is a certain amount of risk now associated with link building to any site and any page.
My initial recommendations then were to beware:
- Sitewide links and site interlinking, and ESPECIALLY if using rich anchor text, and or managing the links in any way (like changing the keyword text)
- Blog comment links
- Article marketing links
- Manipulative RSS syndication links
- Low-quality SEO friendly directory links
- Private blog networks (PBN)
- Low-quality press releases
And do MORE of the following:
- Get links from real websites
- Focus on getting links to inner pages of your site
- Build natural domain authority
- Add lots of new content to your site
- Make sure your web page is OPTIMISED for EVERY keyword phrase for which you want to rank.
- Make sure your content is shareable
My first observations included:
- Google will not just ignore links it doesn’t like if it thinks you have built them. Now, these links can well get you penalised – and quickly – and a lot more noticeable.
- No longer can you be cavalier about where you get your links. I, have been happy to take links from anywhere in the past, safe in the knowledge links are not toxic, and that Google will ignore low-quality links before penalising you for them.
- Your website CAN have a toxic link profile. It’s evidently about YOUR INTENT. If your intent was to rank high in Google for particular keywords using low-quality links, I think that’s enough for Google, these days, to sink your site.
- Ensure your link does not end up duplicated across LOTS and LOTS of low-quality sites. Too many of these types of links DECLARE AN INTENT to Google to manipulate rankings.
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