When to use and not use Google’s “Disavow Links” tool

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25272_When To Use And Not Use Google’s “Disavow Links” Tool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWYdhgedguY

Hey everyone, Adam here. Older brother at SEO Brothers. Today’s video should be a quick on and we’re going to talk about the Disavow Tool.

The disavow tool is a tool inside of Google’s Search Console – formerly Webmaster Tools – that is a link profile cleanup tool. It was released in 2012 on the heels of the Penguin algorithm that targeted spammy and unfavourable link sources.

In a nut shell, this is a tool that allows webmasters to tell Google when they do not want credit for a link pointing to their website. However, it has evolved over the years and people’s understanding of it has changed.

Instead of diving too deep into the tool, I wanted to highlight a few scenarios when you should and shouldn’t consider using the tool and a couple things you should know about it.

Before we dive into my advice, I just want to highlight that this is not a tool for us to choose what links are good and bad. Google does that. So be careful when using it as you can do more harm than good.

1. It is not a tool to help improve visibility. So if you’re doing your own SEO and thought you’d review your link profile and disavow links as a strategy to improve visibility, don’t. It likely won’t work.

2. If you have received a manual action notification as indicated in your Search Console messages that your website has unfavorable links, then it is probably time to do a link profile audit and disavow links.

3. If you’ve received a significant drop in visibility and rankings, it should only be used as a last resort after you’ve done a full industry, technical, and content audit first as you can’t undo disavowing links.

I’m going to wrap things up here for today. If you think you should be disavowing links and you want a second opinion don’t hesitate to reach out – I’d be happy to take a look for you.

I hope everyone is having a great day and we’ll see you all next week.

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