Category Archives: SEO

Google Disavow Links Tool

On Tuesday 16th October 2012, Google announced the launch of its new Disavow Links Tool. This new tool is intended for the use of experienced webmasters who are well-informed of aggressive SEO techniques. The tool aims to help solve the problem of “unnatural links” pointing to your site due to manual spam action.

Disavow links

Building lots of low quality backlinks to your website is not good practise and can be interpreted as black hat SEO. As it has a negative effect upon your page ranking, creating “unnatural links” is sometimes done as a means of attack from competitor sites. The Google Disavow Links tool aims to give website owners a chance to have these links discounted by their spiders.
The tools states “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.”

If you website contains links to unreliable sites, you will be notified of this by Google via email. The email will detail some of the types of links that are considered unnatural up to a maximum of three. These emails will not detail all of the bad links that you have associated with your website however; it is up to you to investigate them yourself.

It is important to note that the vast majority of people should not need to use this tool as they will not have a large number of unnatural links. The process takes weeks to be completed from the time your list of disavowed links is submitted to the time they are ignored by Google as your site will have to be crawled and indexed again, which takes time. You also need to be aware that reinstating a link that has been disavowed takes even longer than disavowing it in the first place; therefore please ensure that it is definitely the right decision to make before you disavow a link. The tool is designed to be used by experienced webmasters who have a good working knowledge of aggressive SEO techniques.

This statement is clear that Google are trying assist people with problems relating to a large volume of low quality links:-

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Disavow links

The Google Disavow Tool is to be used as a last resort to stop your website being associated with unnatural links. Removing the link completely from the web is the most effective way of improving your page ranking; this is done by contacting the person responsible for the other page and having the link removed manually. There will always be a small amount of people that are unreachable and this is why the disavow tool has been introduced. This tool does not remove the link, rather suggests that Google ignore it.

If you believe your website ranking has being harmed by low-quality links that you do not control then you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site rankings.

For more information about this go to:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.htm

EMD Update – Exact Match Domain

Matt Cutts gave us another weather warning or should we say a warning about another update. This time it is the EMD update which is designed to remove low-quality and exact match domains from the Google search results.

The idea is to prevent people coming up with perfect domain names that match the keywords that they are going to be buying. Matt Cutts wants people to be a domain name that works for people.

If your website has suddenly disappeared from Google in October and the domain name is an exact match of keywords then you are likely to have been hit with the EMD update.

Google Panda Alert 25th July 2012

Google Panda went live in February 2011 and as Google continually make updates to the Google search to make improvements the latest announcement to a Google algorithm refresh is today 25th July 2012.

The announcement made via Twitter said “New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. ”

The “Panda” algorithm change improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites but also removed many websites that had used black hat SEO techniques.

This latest update is targeting quality and it looking for site with low quality content. So if your website drops you need to look at the content on your website.

Google sent out messages in since March alerting webmasters, “We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines“.

Google have also said “everyone should not panic” and they have added “we are assuring everyone this was just a case of Google trying to be more transparent and not a warning that a penalty is nigh”.

But this has still left SEO consultants and websites owners worried in fear of what will happen next.