According to an informal and non-scientific poll conducted on Twitter, the vast majority of SEOs prefer to ignore spammy links rather than spend time disavowing them. The subsequent comments echoed the poll results, but some SEOs explained how they took a more nuanced approach and why disavowing makes sense in certain situations.
Link Disavow Tool is a tool that allows you to disavow links
Google’s search console includes a feature that allows publishers and SEOs to tell Google to ignore certain links.
After the Penguin Algorithm was released in 2012, Google created the disavow tool at the request of the SEO community to deal with the massive amount of paid links and other link schemes that SEOs were engaging in.
Paid links and other low-quality links built by the publishers themselves were penalized by the Penguin algorithm.
To restore the penalized websites’ rankings, SEOs and publishers had to request that all of the spammy links they had created be removed.
However, requests to remove links were often ignored, or a website would ask for money to remove them, which could become prohibitively expensive.
Google responded to the SEO community’s request for an easy way to disavow links that couldn’t be removed.
Read Web Team Project Prioritization Frameworks To Set SEO Up For Success.
The disavow tool’s announcement makes it clear that it’s only for links created by publishers and SEOs, and that it’s only for use in the context of avoiding an “unnatural links” penalty.
The 2012 disavow tool announcement by Google stated:
“The primary purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building.
…If, despite your best efforts, you’re unable to get a few backlinks taken down, that’s a good time to use the Disavow Links tool.”
Google ignores links associated with “negative SEO,” according to the announcement, and publishers don’t need to use the disavow tool for random links they aren’t responsible for.
Despite this, many publishers and SEOs are concerned about negative SEO and odd links, and they disavow them anyway.
The majority of SEOs disregard spammy links
Sarah McDowell (@SarahMcDUK) conducted the poll.
It’s worth noting that only 182 people responded to the poll, so it can’t be said to be a representative sample of SEO professionals in general.
Nonetheless, the poll is intriguing because the results heavily favor ignoring spammy links.
Poll Results
Ignore spammy links: 65.5%
Disavow spammy links: 33.5%
It’s possible that what SEOs actually do is more nuanced
According to the poll thread’s discussion comments, SEOs’ use of the disavow tool is more nuanced than the binary choices of ignoring or Disavow.
A number of commenters cited specific criteria or thresholds that would prompt them to file a disavow.
One person was concerned with overly commercial anchor text:
Others were concerned by the threshold of total links:
Others feel that Google’s technology is capable enough to identify poor links:
It’s worth repeating that the poll may not be completely accurate. Nonetheless, the large percentage of SEOs who said they ignored spammy links was unexpectedly high, suggesting a shift in how the SEO community views the disavow tool and increased confidence in Google’s handling of spammy links.
Learn more from SEO and read Is Google considering sitewide links as a ranking factor?
