OK.
For today's video, we wanted to talk about what are the
common mistakes that we see when people try to use the
Disavow Links Tool.
We jotted down a few thoughts, and so we thought we'd sort of
work through them and mention some of the
mistakes that we see.
The first one is the file that you upload is supposed to be
just a regular text file.
So expect something like either a comment on its own
line, a domain, so it starts with domain colon or a URL.
Everything else is weird syntax and, in theory, could
cause the parser to reject the file.
What we see is people sometimes uploading Word
files, so .doc, Excel spreadsheets, and that's the
sort of thing that our parser is not built to handle.
It's expecting just a text file.
So if you upload something really strange, that can cause
the parser to throw that file out, and then the
reconsideration request would not go through.
The other thing that we see is, a lot of the times, the
first attempt at a reconsideration request, you
see people really trying to take a scalpel and pick out
individual bad links in a very granular way.
And for better or worse, sometimes when you got a
really bad link profile, rather than a scalpel, you
might be thinking more of a machete sort of thing.
You need to go a little bit deeper, in terms of getting
rid of the really bad links.
So for example, if you've got links from some very spammy
forum, or something like that, rather than trying to identify
the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to do
a domain colon.
So if you've got a lot of links that you think are bad
from a particular site, just go ahead and do domain colon
and the name of that domain.
Don't, maybe, try to pick out the individual links because
you might be missing a lot more links.
So a lot of the times people try to pick out the individual
URLs, when they should start thinking about domain colon,
at least for the first cut.
The other thing that we see is the domain colon needs to have
the right syntax.
So domain colon and then a domain name.
Don't do domain colon and then HTTP, you know, or www.
or something like that.
An actual domain like example.com or mattcutts.com
is what we're looking for there.
A bunch of people, we sometimes see them putting
context, or the story, or the documentation for the
reconsideration request in the Disavow Links text file that
they try to upload.
And that's really not the right place for it.
The right place to give us the context or to describe what's
going on is in the reconsideration request, not
in the Disavow Links text file.
And a corollary to that is sometimes people will have a
whole story up at the top, and they might have the first line
commented, but then if they paste multiple lines of stuff,
maybe there's some other line there that isn't commented.
So if that's the case, then the parser might again say
this looks like a bad file and throw it out, in an abundance
of caution, and then that might cause the
reconsideration request to not go through.
So you probably don't need a lot of comments.
If they're there, I'd keep them short.
I wouldn't make them multiple lines and all that sort of
stuff, because it increases the likelihood that you might
make a copy and paste error, and then we would not trust
that particular file.
The other thing that we see is sometimes people think that
Disavow is the be all end all, the panacea that's going to
cure all their ills.
And yet, we do want, if you've been doing some bad SEO and
you're trying to cure it, in an ideal world you would
actually clean up as many links as you can off the
actual web.
That's just a really helpful way for us to see, when you're
doing a reconsideration request, that you're putting
in the effort to try to make sure that things have been
corrected and cleaned up and are not going to happen again.
So those are the common things that we see going on with
Disavow Link requests.
By far the biggest one is people submitting like a
Microsoft Word or a doc file, instead of a text file.
But if you look through all of those, I hope you can sort of
do a little checklist and make sure that you're submitting a
file that will pass by the parser and make sure that you
put any context in the reconsideration request, all
those sorts of things.
And that just increases your odds that the Disavow and,
thus, the reconsideration request process will go well.