This Is Why Disowning a Link Is a Good Idea
Backlinks are one of the most important parts of a SEO strategy. We are talking about both internal and external links. As a SEO Pro in Phoenix, we understand that not all links are good.
Sometimes, some links do more damage than good. If the website is bad or low-quality, then links generated from it are also going to be bad. It is essential for a successful SEO strategy that a site’s backlink profile contains links that are useful and not spammy. In some cases, a website that was sending traffic to your site might turn bad, or maybe they start selling their links for harmful SEO purposes. You’d be surprised to know that it’s not that uncommon.
We suggest you run a link audit every month and analyze all your links. If you see that some links are coming from bad websites, you need to disavow them immediately. Google’s Disavow tool allows site owners to get rid of these bad links they might have accumulated over time.
This tool is really powerful and before you implement it, we recommend you read the manual that comes with it. If you disavow a good link by mistake, then consider that link gone forever. You need to identify the links you need to disavow first, and double check that you don’t want them anymore. Here are some of the most common reasons you might want to disavow some links:
The site is not indexed by search engines
If the website where the link is coming from is not indexed by Google, it’s a sure sign of a bad site. Sometimes a site is not indexed when they are relatively new or they have blocked Google from indexing them. But in 99% of cases, if a linking site is not indexed, it’s because Google has flagged it as spam.
The quickest way to check if your linking site is indexed or not is to type the site name <sitename.com> in the search bar and see if anything comes up. If the site exists but you don’t see it anywhere in the search results, it means Google has blacklisted it, so disavow it immediately.
The site is malicious
When you are going through the links to see what’s good and what needs disavowing, you are going to have to visit the site they originated from. Unfortunately, some sites are spammy and can infect your computer with malicious elements.
Make sure that when you are visiting such suspicious backlinks, your computer system is installed with a solid ad blocker and a noscript plugin, in addition to a good anti-malware program. If the linking site tries to forcefully download something, leave it and disavow it immediately.
The site page has spammy links
Some sites engage heavily in negative SEO practices; the best way to identify these sites is by looking at the linking page. These spammy pages contain hundreds or even thousands of links. Any site that has that many links on its site pages is not good. Period. You need to disavow these links right now.
The site is a bad directory
Just as the name suggests, directory sites are sites that try to keep a record of blog posts, articles, or any content online. It used to work well when internet was new and there were not that many sites, but today when we have millions of websites with billions of web pages, these directories are almost worthless.
Maybe you once subscribed to directory marketing a really long time ago, but its out-of-date links are probably useless. It’s a good idea to disavow them
