There are nearly 1.13 billion websites in the world as of Feb 2023. However, only 18% of websites are active, and a staggering 82% of websites are inactive. It means that not all websites achieve the desired marketing goals and then become inactive. It happens due to SEO mistakes that many marketers need to pay attention to when optimizing their websites. This ultimately leads to lowering the website ranking on the SERPs. One essential factor to concentrate on is disavowing links. Disavowing spammy links to your website helps improve the domain authority, lowers spam score, etc. It helps improve the performance of the essential SEO metrics and increases users trust in the business. Let us discuss in the blog what are bad or spammy links and how to disavow links using Google Search Console.
What is a bad or spammy link?
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. These are an essential part of running successful SEO campaigns. When you have links to your website from relevant and industry-oriented websites, they help build better brand authority with the search engines. When running any type of PPC ad like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, Instagram Ads, etc., the focus is on ad relevance. It helps increase clicks on the ad and increases the chances of the visitor converting to a customer.
Not every link to your website is a bad or spammy link. Some of the links help drive major traffic and the user experience. Bad links are links that are from spammy websites and could lower your website rankings. Spammy websites are websites that deal with black hat SEO techniques and also have lower domain scores. These websites have no content, thin content, or duplicate content on the page. So, in your search engine optimization strategy, you need to focus on choosing the relevant websites that help increase traffic, optimize linking structure, increase conversions, increase visitor time on pages, decrease your bounce rate, maximize page speed, etc.
Why disavow links?
When running a website, many essential factors need to be monitored by the website owner to improve the ranking of the website on the SERPs. One of the crucial factors in doing so is to disavow links. With such a wide range of websites available, choosing the relevant websites that help improve the website authority becomes critical. Many spammy websites are harmful to your SEO. Also, it becomes quite crucial to target these websites and disavow links from them so that the website's health is not affected.
There are many myths regarding SEO: it takes a lot of time to rank the website, increase website traffic, etc. These may prove to be true when the issues related to your website are not fixed. However, this is not always the case. When you work on avoiding harmful SEO and disavowing links that affect the performance of your website, you get to see an enhanced website performance. When you see a message from Google that says “unnatural links”, you are being penalized whether you are knowingly complicit or not.
How to disavow backlinks?
When you see that you are receiving links from unauthoritative websites and see a decrease in website performance, it is now time to start looking at the number of backlinks that your website receives. To do so, you need to disavow links that impact the website's performance. The more relevant the backlinks to your website, the higher the chances of the website achieving the desired results.
Websites with a Google Analytics tracking tag also have access to the Google Search Console tool. The console tool houses information for all the links that your website receives. It shows you the top linking texts, external links, internal links, and top linking sites, which helps you to know the essential links to your website.
You can conduct a backlink audit from the link report page of Google Search Console. You can click the big “export external links”, choose more sample links and export it as the desired file type of your choice. You need to know about the number of backlinks to your website. To identify the backlinks to your website, you can use the Semrush backlink audit tool to identify the links you need to disavow. You can create a (*.txt) to be submitted to the Google Disavow tool. There’s a specific format that you need to follow:
• Ensure that each entry needs to be on a different line.
• Each entry needs to begin with “domain:” (without the quotation mark)
The file name is not important, but you need to ensure that the specific format is followed. Blacklisting the entire domain will help you save the tedium of listing each URL specifically. However, there may be instances where you would have to decide whether you want to disavow a single link from a site or all the other links. However, as we offer complete PPC solutions through our offshrore PPC services, in the same way, you can outsource backlink analysis services to our SEO professionals that analyze the backlinks to your website.
To disavow links to your website from Google Search Console, you need to follow the following steps.
Step1: Head over to the Google Disavow Tool. Now choose the file to upload.
Step 2: Now you need to ‘select a property to view its status or to upload a new list of disavowed links’. If you have multiple accounts, be sure to select the correct property.
Step 3: Select the disavow file you already created, and select 'Open' to upload it to the disavow tool. Now you need to upload your disavow list as a .txt file to the Google Disavow Tool.
Once you have completed the above mentioned steps to disavow links, you would see that Google will no longer consider the listed domains when determining your page’s ranking.
Benefits of disavowing links to website
When you disavow links to your website, you inform Google not to count these links when assessing the ranking of these websites. The search engines avoid these links when considering the indexing and ranking of the website. As you work on SEO pagination so that it is easier to determine which pages to show for the relevant keywords or search terms entered. This eases the website navigation for users so that they easily get to the page for the products or services they are looking for. You can use the Google Disavow tool to avoid links to your website and focus on getting links from authoritative ones. Some of the vital benefits of disavowing links to websites are mentioned below.
a. Builds brand awareness - The disavow links are essential for your website as it helps in building brand awareness. Be it any form of marketing like email marketing, content marketing, running PPC ad campaigns, etc., it is essential to build brand awareness. The more the users are aware of your brand name, the higher are the chances that the relevant target audience to take the desired action on the landing page.
When you disavow links to your website, it helps the users to determine that most of the business offerings are authentic. It helps in lowering of spam scores which ultimately leads to increasing the website visibility on the SERPs. It happens due to the fact that once the disavow file is attached to the website, the search engines do not consider them relevant to your business. With a proper plan & strategy working on link building in SEO, you get to have an increased number of backlinks to your website.
With the increase in the number of social media users and the popularity in online platforms, marketers have to focus on building brand awareness on these platforms. Whether running PPC ads or SEO campaigns on social media platforms, the more the users are aware of your business, the higher are the chances of them taking the desired action. Moreso, social media are platforms that connect people like Facebook users are friends & family, LinkedIn has professional users and C-level executives, etc. So, it becomes essential to work on social media marketing as the better the brand awareness, the better the chances for the users to promote your brand name for the product or service you offer. It thus helps in peer-to-peer marketing.
b. Drives relevant traffic - The next point to disavowing links to your website is that it drives relevant traffic to the website. As in PPC ad campaigns, you focus on audience targeting to determine which audiences are relevant to your website in the same way you need to determine the audiences that are relevant to your SEO campaigns. When you perform a backlink audit to determine which links you wish to disavow and which links to keep to your website, it helps you to have an idea of sources that drive traffic to the website.
When you disavow links to your website, there is a high chance that you do not have users from these websites. It also helps to avoid the users to your website that is just clicking on the search results and doing window shopping. This also enhances the number of potential users with high chances of taking the desired action. The more number of users to your website, the higher are the chances of the users to take the desired action.
As in PPC ads, you have to pay for every click made on the ad, so you add negative keywords to prevent your PPC ads from appearing to irrelevant queries. This helps target relevant users with a high chance of taking the desired action. Although, in search engine optimization, you do not have to pay for any clicks, but it becomes essential to target the users that are interested in taking the desired action. With an SEO audit, you get to know about user interests, their search behavior, etc. So, you can target the relevant users that are looking for the products or services that your business offers.
c. Improves website performance - The next benefit of disavowing backlinks to your website is that it helps improve website performance. When you have relevant websites providing you with backlinks, the brand authority of your webpage increases. It helps to improve the performance of the essential SEO metrics that are critical to be focused upon when optimizing the website performance. Website performance includes many essential SEO KPIs that are vital to be focused upon, like page loading speed, customer engagement value, page engagement, keyword ranking, click-through rate, bounce rate, organic traffic, etc.
With online marketing being different from traditional marketing, we have impatient users that would have no other thought in choosing other websites if they encounter any issue with your website. So, focusing on having a good website that performs well becomes essential. You can conduct an SEO audit to determine if the website performs well by analyzing the performance of vital SEO metrics. If you find conducting an SEO audit for your website a difficult task, you can outsource SEO services.
d. Increases users trust - The next vital benefit of disavowing backlinks is that it increases users' trust in your business. When you have a good website and have the SEO metrics performing well, it means that you are getting links from authoritative websites. When you have increased users' trust in your business, they are highly likely to promote your business to their friends & family.
The core point for any business is to increase users' trust. This is essential in the long run as once they are associated with your business, gaining their trust helps to stay in touch with the users in the long run. As in PPC ad campaigns, you focus on running remarketing campaigns that help in lead generation on the landing page; similarly, you can run personalized SEO campaigns. In SEO, you can write eye-catchy meta descriptions that attract user's attention, unique content, etc., to increase users' trust. As in PPC ads, you focus on ad personalization to grab user's attention so that they make click on the ad.
e. Avoid search engine penalties - When you disavow links to your website, you also avoid the search engine penalties. With Google Search Console disavow tool, you inform the search engine that you do not want the specified links to your webpage. The less search engine penalties that you have on your website, the higher are the chances of better ranking on the SERPs.
As in PPC ads, you focus on avoiding the ad fatigue so that there are ad rank is not affected. In the same way, you need to avoid search engine penalties so that your website health is not affected. The SEO backlinks to your page need to be analyzed properly so that your website performance is enhanced and search engines do not charge penalties. As you focus on avoiding keyword cannibalization, avoid duplicate content, etc., to ease search engine results to the user's search query. In the same way, you need to avoid irrelevant website links to your page to avoid search engine penalties.
When to disavow links?
When you determine that your website is receiving links you need to ensure which website links you wish to allow and which links to disavow. But, when you see that the spammy links to your website needs to be stopped, it becomes essential to disavow links. You can do this using the Google disavow tool. To do so, you need to check backlinks, that are relevant to your business and disavow links that are irrelevant. You need to attach the disavow file to prevent these from linking to your web page.
Link building in SEO is important to gain better website presence, increase brand awareness, etc, and can be done through guest posting, content marketing, press release, etc. However, you need to disavow links when you experience an impact on the website performance. Some of the points that you can focus on to avoid links are:
• When you have links from spammy websites.
• Low-quality links.
• Links from hacking websites that may cause manual action on the page.
Conclusion
Having discussed on the importance of link building in our blog ‘8 local SEO link building strategies,’ it is now critical to elucidate which links are essential to keep and which links need to be disavowed. Links from spammy websites need to be disavowed so that the target users to your website are relevant users. Disavowing the links to your website is essential as it helps gain user's trust, build brand awareness, etc. You can work on customer retention and acquisition strategy so that the users to your website choose your business for the product or services offered. You can consider conducting a backlink audit to disavow links and determine which links to avoid. If avoiding these links is a tough task to perform, you can outsource backlinks analysis services to a digital marketing company and achieve the desired marketing goals.
References:
• How to Disavow Links
• Google’s Disavow Tool: What To Do Before You Start