The link disavow tool has been out there for nearly two weeks now and while some have just dived in and used the feature others have been asking Google more detailed questions. We’ve even got the answers to some of these questions, they have come directly from Google’s head of web spam team, Matt Cutts.
Question:
“How will people know what links they should remove?”
Answer:
“When we’re taking targeted action on some specific links, the emails that go out now include examples of bad links. We provide example links to guide sites that want to clean up the bad linking. At the same time, we don’t want to help bad actors learn how to spam better, which is why we don’t provide an exhaustive list.”
Question:
“How are you dealing with index files? Do you have to remove all variations, such as like this:
http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com
http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com/
http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com/index.html”
Answer:
“We tried to cover this in the last two to three questions [of the announcement post]. Technically these are different URLs, so if you want to be ultra-safe, then you would list the URL variants.”
“Practically speaking though, Google normally canonicalizes such URLs to a single URL, so if you’re going off the backlinks that you download from “google.com/webmasters/”, then you should normally only need to list one url.”
Question:
“Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?”
Answer:
“That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.”
Question:
“Do manual actions specifically say if they are related to bad links?”
Answer:
“The message you receive does indicate what the issue with your site is. If you have enough bad links that our opinion of your entire site is affected, we’ll tell you that. If we’re only distrusting some links to your site, we now tell you that with a different message and we’ll provide at least some example links.”
Question:
“What prevents, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but seemingly inevitable concerns about “negative negative SEO?” In other words, someone decides to disavow links from good sites as perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad? More to the point, are you mining this data to better understand what are bad sites?”
Answer:
“Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests. We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”
“We may do spot checks, but we’re not planning anything more broadly with this data right now. If a webmaster wants to shoot themselves in the foot and disavow high-quality links, that’s sort of like an IQ test and indicates that we wouldn’t want to give that webmaster’s disavowed links much weight anyway. It’s certainly not a scalable way to hurt another site, since you’d have to build a good site, then build up good links, then disavow those good links. Blackhats are normally lazy and don’t even get to the “build a good site” stage.”
Question:
“Any last thoughts, comments or perhaps warnings of mistakes you’ve seen people make?”
Answer:
“I have gotten a couple people asking “If I disavow links, do I still need to do a reconsideration request?” We answered that in the blog post, but the answer is yes.”
“We want to reiterate that if you have a manual action on your site (if you got a message in Webmaster Tools for example), and you decide to disavow links, you do still need to do a reconsideration request.”
“We recommend waiting a day or so after disavowing links before doing the reconsideration request to give our reconsideration request system time to pick up the disavowed links, and we also recommend mentioning that you disavowed links in the reconsideration request itself.”
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