Disavowing

Also known as Disavow Links

Disavowing is the method by which we ask Google to ignore some of the backlinks that point at your website. If Google chooses to heed the request, then they will not take the submitted backlinks into account when working out where your website pages should rank in the SERPs. This is a ‘must-know’ aspect of SEO.

Submitting a disavow request to Google could be viewed as a way for some SEO people to ask for forgiveness for past sins, depending on how much of an SEO cynic you are. Maybe you dabbled with buying crappy backlinks from people on sketchy SEO forums.

You might have even dabbled with PBNs in the past, just for fun, and only with friends, and you thought you could give up whenever you wanted to. Disavowing is a redemptive tool for some.

Suppose you’re of a more positive disposition. In that case, you might like to think of disavowing as a method of ensuring that, wherever possible, Google pays more attention to the many wonderful and authoritative websites that naturally link to you, instead of paying too much attention to the bottom-feeding detritus of the Internet underbelly that also naturally links to you.

If you’re a full-on tin-foil hat-wearing SEO warrior, then you might celebrate the fact you can disavow links as the last line of defence against the negative-SEO campaigns of your enemies. Yup, sadly ‘negative SEO is really a ‘thing’.

Why is disavowing so important to some SEO campaigns?

When deciding where your website should rank Google has a look at who you hang out with. It does this by looking at who links to your website. If the cool kids that do well at school and never miss a shower link to your website and say nice things about you then Google forms the option that you too must be a cool kid, and up the rankings they sent you.

If Google looks at your mates and thinks they look like the kinda kids who might scrump apples when nobody is looking, then sadly you may be tarred with the same stinky brush as those wronguns.

Generally vague ‘hand-waving’ SEO advice dictates that if you do good work and create fantastic content, then the cool, clean kids will naturally want to link to your website. Because you must be cool and do all your homework on time, just like they do.

If the motorbike-riding kids who smoke behind the bike sheds and practice swearing in front of the mirror link to your website Google might form a very different opinion of you.

This is the SEO equivalent of being dragged into the headmaster’s office at High School and being given a stern warning about peer pressure and possibly smoking. On your way of the headmaster’s office Google might look at where you currently rank and decide to take you down a peg or two. The pegs being places in SERPs, just in case you’re not following this tortured analogy.

So what can be done?
Google knows the website is wild, and sometimes people might link to your website even if you aren’t skipping home from school hand in hand with them.

Google also knows that sometimes the school bully might deliberately build naff backlinks to your site, just to make you look bad. Boooooo to the bullies!
So roughly speaking, that’s why the disavow process exists. If you’re monitoring your backlinks, like, you, should, be, then you’ll spot a sudden rise in bad backlinks. And now you know what to do about them.

So what exactly is the disavow process?

Despite the fact we have designed this SEO Glossary to be good starting point for anyone wanting to get into SEO up to their information-overloaded eyeballs, there are better people than us writing fantastic guides to the mechanics of some SEO tasks. So we’re going to take the easy option and give you a nice numbered list to explain the process.

Seven steps to disavow heaven:

1. Use a backlink research tool like Semrush, Ahrefs or Google Search Console to create a list of all the sites that link to your website.
2. Check the quality of the sites linking to you using something like the Semrush toxic backlink tool
3. Manually check as many of the sites as possible, if they feel wrong, they are probably doing your ranking no good (but could also be doing it no harm). It’s important to do the manual check because however good backlink toxicity checkers are, it’s almost impossible for them to be perfect. False positives are the enemy of the disavow process.
4. Toddle on over to Google Seach Console and download yourself a disavow template file. You’ll need to visit ye olde prefix style Search Console; for reasons unknown, the new domain flavour Search Console doesn’t have a disavow tool.
5. Put all the backlink URLs you wish to cast into the heart of the sun into the disavow template you downloaded in step four.
6. Submit your disavow file to Search Console
7. Pray to the heinous vengefully (occasionally) merciful gods of SEO that Google actually pay attention to your request.

There’s no direct method in Search Console to find out if your disavow request fell on deaf ears or not. If there were then the wronguns of the SEO world could use the disavow tool to figure out which of their PBNs or link farms were fooling Google, and which were not.

How, when, or if Google will adjust your rankings because of your disavow request is a mystery up there with why stone age man saw fit to drag stones across the hilly terrain of Southern England to build Stone Henge. Some things humans aren’t meant to know, maaaaan.

So in summary, submit your disavow request then watch the SERPs for changes. You might want to make a sandwich or something, you might be waiting a while.

Honestly, read that disclaimer at the start of this article again. If you balls up the disavow process you can remove your website from Google index entirely. In fact that disclaimer is so important let’s see it again: