

Google Launches Disavow Links Tool - taylorbuley
http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-disavow-links-tool-136826

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trevin
I'm excited to see this. People in the SEO industry have clamored for this for
a long time, but it wasn't really necessary until negative SEO has became more
prevalent and effective the last few months. Traditionally, a link to your
site could never really 'hurt' your domain. That has changed as Google has
rolled out Penguin though and there are plenty of horror stories of people
building 1000s of spammy links to a 3rd party sites and harming their
rankings[1]. It wasn't fair to allow website owners to have their domains
penalized for something that they have no control over...you can't prevent
people from building malicious links to your site.

Also worth noting that Bing rolled this same feature out in June of this
year[2].

[1][http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-
seo-...](http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/)
[2][http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/06/27/disavow-
links-you-don-t-trust.aspx)

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dchuk
I would assume that this tool will serve as a new source of sites for Google's
manual review team to take a look at.

It's odd they launched this though, as it's directly acknowledging 1) that
"bad links" can hurt your rankings and 2) that the algorithm is not doing a
good enough job/keeping up well enough.

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AndresOspina
Wow finally a tool for this damned links. :)

I have one site with many damned links maked for the competence.

~~~
AndresOspina
Now here Matt Cutts <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA>

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gojomo
Seems a bit embarrassing for Google (and before them Bing) to have to offer
this. "Our giant well-funded teams of professionals can't tell the difference
between organic links and those maliciously crafted to sabotage you, so it's
up to you, individual webmasters with far fewer resources and visibility into
the link graph, to fix this for us."

(Update: reading the official announcement and viewing the Cutts video, seems
there's also a strong aspect of "pleading for amnesty" provided by this tool,
for erasing past sleazy link-building efforts. Together with the repeated
admonitions "most people shouldn't use this power user tool", it almost seems
like a trick: like when the police publish that people with outstanding
warrants have won a sweepstakes.)

