Google’s Matt Cutts announced at the PubCon marketing conference that Google is rolling out a new much-anticipated link disavowal tool. Bad links from poor quality sites can harm a site’s rankings in Google, and Google has implemented this tool to let webmasters remove bad links from their link profile.
The tool will operate by uploading a txt file that contains a list of domains that a webmaster wishes to disavow. There will also be a domain: operator that will let a webmaster disavow all links from a domain.
Here’s a sample of what a disavowal tool text file would look like:
http://www.shadysite.com/bad-post http://www.shadysite.com/another-bad-post domain: http://wwww.reallyshadysite.com
The tool is ostensibly live at the following domain:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
Cutts warns that it’s always better to have bad links removed rather than disavow links with the tool, but recognizes that’s not always possible.
Well, cough cough, guess my excitement for this new tool is somewhat incriminating. But there are loads of ways to get bad links to a site. Especially when a “shadylink” is different now than it used to be.
I think Google has two goals with this.
1. Chill out (and hopefully help out) some people that got Penguinified
2. Add a little additional protection against NSEO.
Love it. Thanks for the post Michael.
Hey, do you guys think that using this tool can have a negative impact on rankings?
There’s no consensus yet. But when I saw Matt Cutts announce it, he recommended caution, if that is any hint.