HOW TO GET RID OF BAD BACKLINKS

The Curse of Bad Back Links - & the New Google WeBMaSter Tool "Disavow"

Now in this section I'm going to cover backlinks, what are they? How do you get rid of them? What to do if your SEO has employed these tactics and landed you with a useless Website.

Bad Back Links, I'm getting approached by quite a few customers and additionally finding websites that have been seriously effected by what are called bad back links. Now in January Google unveiled its latest Robot crawler that searches the web, adds new websites and ranks them according to their online presence, their keywords (Google now avoids using Metadata) page description and the density and use of keywords in your site. Additionally it recognizes links in and out of your site. Those form other sites that link to your site are called backlinks.

Now some backlinks we do not have control over as people will find things they like and post them on sites such as facebook or other social media type sites, but the majority of these are o.k. as long as they don't involve gambling or porn.

Now what Google has a problem with is Links from what we call farming websites Link Farms. Those websites that don't really have any information to share, hardly any content and just seem to be hundreds if not thousands of links to other websites, some actually advertise themselves as directories. Before Google made it's changes these sites were popular among unscrupulous SEOs or people who did not know any better, or people who jumped on that band wagon. Mainly because it was the quickest and easiest way to get your website to page 1 of Google, because they provided a quick and easy way to get multiple links to your website, which basically gave an improper view of how relevant or popular the website was. I've seen examples of people placing links on websites all over the world with some of the least tangible relevance.

Now that Google has done away with this bad practice it has unfortunately affected quite a lot of people who have spent years building and with that, spent lots of money to have their websites built and subsequently optimised. Now some of these businesses are in turmoil because they now have lost all their traffic. I've seen websites that were previously getting 2,000 visitors a month now struggling to get 100 visitors.

The Curse of Bad Backlinks

Get rid of bad backlinks

Get rid of Bad Backlinks

In the next section I shall tell you what to do to get rid of these links.

Well you've got several choices really here.

1. Start Over again from Scratch, by that I mean purchase a similar domain name, transfer the website to that and set up a basic website and link into the new one (you should not be penalised for being linked into an affected account). However you need to make sure the old or infected site, does not plagiarise (copy the content) of your new uninfected site.

2. Seek out all your bad backlinks and then email each of the bad linking websites and asked for the links to be removed, you can even send them some formal notice (kind of a threat) to remove these. Does not always work and very time consuming!

3. There is a new Google Webmaster Tool to Disavow backlinks! They refer to Link spam and bad linking schemes and also tell you to try and do option 2 first.

If you’ve done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, and there are still some links you just can’t seem to get down, that’s a good time to visit our new Disavow links page. When you arrive, you’ll first select your site.

Now you need to be set up with Google Webmaster Tools and if you click on the link above in the search box just type DISAVOW and you find the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A new tool to disavow links
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Now I have just tried this (couple of hours ago) and I am waiting to here a response to my request, presuming I get one? Hopefully I will see the results in the next week or two?

So I shall report back soon

If you would like to read more about this tool see below

Google WEBMASTER just introduced a new tool to disavow BAD BACK links.

This means that problem links will no longer be "counted" against you .

Google is very clear that this is an advanced tool for "Power Users" and not something that everyone needs. People should be careful messing around with it.

Some key points:
It is very important that you first determine which links are bad - you don't want to accidentally remove links that are valuable to you. If you have to "reavow" links it takes even longer and the link could lose some of its initial value. So if you aren't sure, you may want to get a Link Audit to see where you stand.

Google considers your disavow submission "a very strong suggestion" but not a definitive they have to abide by.
Disavowed links are submitted via a file that you upload to Google. There is only one file per domain name, so if you have multiple people managing your domain name, be very careful that only one file is used or you could wind up messing up links that you've already disavowed.

Links that are disavowed are treated by Google like a nofollow.

Google says it may take weeks to process.
Google strongly advises you to still attempt to manually remove links first by reaching out the site owners.

If you do a reinclusion/reconsideration request, and have disavowed links, Google wants you to note that in the request so they can cross check things.

You can remove either a precise URL (example: http://www.url.com/page.html and it will disavow links from that page only) or you can disavow links from an entire domain by putting domain:http://www.url.com. Be sure you only put one URL per line.

You can include comments on a line on their own by prefacing with a #

Google hasn't said whether there will be a limit to the number of links you can disavow, but you can bet that if people starting abusing this (getting bad links to boost rankings and then disavowing them before there are penalized), Google will have to put restrictions in place. So as not to ruin what is a great feature: DO NOT ABUSE THIS.

For now there is a file size limit of 2MB (and there is no way you should need to disavow so many links that your file size exceeds that).

The tool is live and can be found here: http://google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main Note You need to be logged into your webmaster account for link to work!

You will see your domain name listed, and you click the red button to disavow links. You'll see a warning and then you click again and then a box pops up so you can upload your file.