>>Matt Cutts: Hey everybody. We just released a new tool called the disavow links tool,
which lets you tell Google which links to your site you'd like to ignore. Let me give
you a little bit of context, tell you about how it works, and basically fill you in on
the background. As Google has gotten better and better at
assessing backlinks, there are some people who more or less want to clean up their backlinks.
Maybe you've been doing paid links, or someone on your behalf has. You might have been doing
blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, guest book spam, you-name-it link spam. Maybe you
paid somebody to write some low-quality articles and syndicate those all over the place with
some very keyword rich anchor text. And maybe Google sent you a message that says, "We've
seen unnatural links to your site" or "We've taken targeted action to some unnatural links
to your site." And as a result, you want to clean up those backlinks.
Well, first and foremost, the main thing that we recommend is getting those links actually
removed from the web. If a random person looks up links to your site, you don't want to see
a bunch of spammy links. It's good to clean up for other purposes. You don't want them
to jump to conclusions. It's also good so that other search engines won't see spammy
links to your site as well. We do recommend that you write to people,
try to get the link taken down, and basically get as many of those links as possible. Now,
at the same time, we realize that sometimes, it's not possible to get in contact with everybody.
So at the point where you have written to as many people as you can multiple times,
you've really tried hard to get in touch, and you've only been able to get some certain
fraction of those links down, and there's still a small fraction of links left, that's
where you can use our new tool, called the disavow links tool.
So how does it work? Well, first off, you need to figure out "Which links should I disavow?"
Hopefully, you have a pretty good idea, but there's a couple ways you can take a whack
at that. First, you can look at your recent links. We will show you, now, Google will
let you download a list of links sorted by the date that we discovered them. So you can
look at the most recent links, if you might have just gotten a message or a warning about
unnatural links. We're working on ways where when we provide
links that we, the unnatural links warning, we'll actually, in the text of that message,
give you maybe one, maybe two, possibly up to three examples of the sorts of links that
we're talking about. Now, this is not a comprehensive list. We're
saying, "These are the sorts of links that we're trying to ignore, or that we don't count,
or that we think looks low-quality or spammy." And so the message does not mean "Remove these
two or three links and now do a reconsideration request." It's to give you a flavor of the
sorts of links, whether it's a low-quality article bank thing that you were syndicating,
or whether it's a paid link network, or whatever. The sorts of links that we would like to see
taken down. So how do you actually use the tool? How do
you disavow links? It's actually pretty simple. We want to reiterate that most people do not
need to use this tool. There's been a little bit of brouhaha in the last few months where
some people really want to clean up their backlinks. But if you're an average Mom and
Pop, if you're just doing normal sorts of things, you're not doing really especially
egregious or aggressive SEO with all kinds of weird link networks or stuff like that,
this is not a tool that you should need to use under any sort of normal circumstances.
So when you load up the tool, you'll hopefully see a lot of disclaimers that remind you,
under normal circumstances, you shouldn't need to use this. Only if you've gotten a
message, if you really think there's an issue with your backlinks, and you really want to
clean it up, and you're a power user, you feel comfortable doing technical things.
The first version of the interface that we're launching reflects that. It's basically the
ability to upload a text file of links that you'd like to ignore. So my site, for example,
is mattcutts.com. Suppose I want to ignore a link from example.com/page.html. You simply
make a text file that says "example.com/page.html" and you upload that. So the format is just
one URL per line. We try to make it a little bit easy. Suppose you have a porn site, pornsite.com,
and it links to you. And you want to ignore all links from that domain. You can say "domain:pornsite.com."
You can also have comments, you can have little hash signs, you can document your efforts
to try to get links pulled down or provide some more context there. And then you just
basically upload that text file. Now, it's a single text file for a domain.
So if you have multiple registered owners, and you want to add or edit or update that
file, we provide a way to download that file. Then you would be able to edit it. You can
add another link to ignore, or anything along those lines. If you wanted to, you could empty
that file out, and then you can reupload that, and we will process that in turn.
Now, how will Google actually treat it when you say, "I'd like Google to ignore this link"?
We treat it as a very strong suggestion, but we don't treat it as something that we absolutely
have to abide by. And before you get nervous or worried, that's the exact same methodology
that we use for rel="canonical." So we have seen some guys where they will have a website,
and they say, "Oh, I'm going to rel="canonical" over here," and that's a 404, and they can
shoot themselves in the foot. So we do reserve the right to look at things and say, "Oh,
we think this is something that the user didn't intend to do." But in normal circumstances,
we will take it as a very strong suggestion, and basically treat it a lot like 'nofollow'.
Drop that link out of our processing. We do expect that it will take probably weeks
once you upload your list of links to disavow for all those links to be disavowed because
we have to recrawl those pages, reindex those pages, and reprocess them in order to attach
the attribute that says, "Okay, this link we would like to no longer treat with the
same weight. We would like to treat it with zero weight."
So it does take a fair amount of time. If you're doing a reconsideration request, I
would explicitly mention, "Hey, I have disavowed links," just so that we can go and try to
check up on that whenever the manual web spam team is investigating.
The other thing I would say is this is a power user tool. We don't want people to go overboard
with this. Most people shouldn't need to use this. Really only use it if you have good
reason to think that you need to. In particular, somebody is sure to ask, "Well, what if I
want to undisavow a link, or reavow it?" And the answer is, "That will take even longer."
So I would say, once you disavow a link, make sure that it's a link that you really want
to disavow, that you don't want to have it count anymore, because it will take a lot
longer, and we might not give it the same weight if we start to allow it to be reavowed.
So only take a look at the links that were either provided as examples or the links that
you think are truly spammy, and those are the ones that you really want to disavow.
Try as much as you can to clean things up beforehand, and then use the disavow tool
afterwards, if you feel comfortable. The last thing I just want to reiterate, and
I want to really get this across: most people should not need to use this. We build our
algorithms and we look at our spam processing such that in most cases, we handle things
just fine. A very small number of people are getting these unnatural links warnings. Proportional
to the web, most people do not need to be using this tool.
It's also an advanced tool, just like with rel="canonical." If you rel="canonical" to
somewhere that doesn't exist, it is possible to shoot yourself in the foot. So be carefully.
Don't just go in willy-nilly and submit a ton of files, and you're like, "Okay, I'm
changing a whole bunch of stuff every single time." You really want to maybe do an audit
of your backlinks and try to get an idea of the ones that look truly spammy, or the ones
that, according to recent stuff, look like they are not what links that they should count.
Those are the links that you might want to think about disavowing.
I realize, even if I tell everybody this, there will still be a lot of people who just
run for the disavow link tool. But again, whenever we're doing reconsideration requests,
we are going to look at the set of links that existed before. And then we're going to be
doing spot checks. We're going to be look at "Are those links off the web?" So don't
just immediately think, "Disavow is the answer for all my ills!" You're also going to want
to try to remove stuff off the web first. And this is a power tool. It's something where
it is possible, in the process of telling Google to ignore links to your site, to make
mistakes. So I would approach it with caution. I wouldn't just jump in. If you are a Mom
and Pop, if you haven't used your own SEO, if you haven't used random link networks that
you found on SEO Forums, this is probably not something that you should be using. I
just want to try to reiterate that. Hopefully, everybody can remind everybody else of that
if people are talking about it on forums or conferences or whatever.
But we are pretty excited to be able to offer this because we do hear from SEOs who try
to do clean up. There's an entire niche for people, for SEOs, whose job it is to clean
up backlinks. And this is a tool in that arsenal, after you've done all the other cleanup that
you can do. So we're really happy that we are providing this option. And thanks for
all the feedback for the people who asked for it. Let us know what you think of it,
and then we'll continue to iterate and look at other ways to improve. Thanks.