When You Should Use Link Disavow Tool

When Google first launched the disavow tool, many were confused if they should use the tool or not.

There was no specific instruction on how to use it and if webmasters needed to do anything with it.

Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts discussed the disavow tool through a webmaster help video. He described when the disavow tool should be used.

When a webmaster finds some backlinks from low-quality sites that he can not remove, he can submit the links to Google to disavow the links.

What Matt Cutts Said in the Video

Cutts suggested you use the disavow tool even if your site has not been penalized. He said something below:

What Matt Cutts Said in the Video

If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks like there’s some weird bot that’s building up a bunch of links to your site and you have no idea where it came from, that’s the perfect time to use disavow as well,” Cutts said. “I wouldn’t worry about going ahead and disavowing links even if you don’t have a message in your webmaster console.

So if you’ve done the work to keep an active look on your backlinks and you see something strange going on, you don’t have to wait around. Feel free to just go ahead and pre-emptively say, you know what this is a weird domain, I have nothing to do with it, and no idea what this particular bot is doing in terms of making links, so go ahead and do disavow even on a domain level.

If you’re at all stressed, if you’re worried, if you’re not able to sleep at night because you think Google might have something, or might see it, or we might get a spam report about you, or there might be some misunderstanding or an algorithm might rank your site lower, I would feel free to just go ahead and disavow those links as well.

Matt Cutts

On the disavow tool page, it states that the disavow tool should only be used if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.

However, Cutts says something different, that the disavow tool should be used when you are worried about some backlinks even if those links aren’t yet causing issues.

So definitely observe your backlinks, particularly your new ones. If you are not using the disavow tool, it is high time you used disavow tool for that poor quality or suspicious backlinks before they can have any impact on your site.

Bottom Line

Webmasters should keep an eye on their backlinks profile, make disavows when they get any suspicious changes, and not wait for it to be penalized and show up as a message in webmaster tools.

See How to disavow Bad or Low Quality Links Form Google and Bing