Description: A get-set-go guide for disavow file. To know the necessary rules for the disavow file. A quick guide to create it.
Here I will discuss about disavow file in brief description. Doesn't matter you have a popular blog or not, you are a Blogger or you have a business website, you should be familiar with SEO terms to stay away from any penalties to your site. Disavow file now is an element of SEO. However, if you have a budget you may hire some SEO companies to handle all the things for your brand website, but if you are a blogger like me or you don't want to pay any amount of money you must be familiar with SEO because Google has decided to fight with web spam by their automatic algorithm updates. If Google found any type of negative SEO pointing to your blogs or websites, you would not get higher ranking in search engine because of the automatic penalties.
You should make a schedule to check your backlinks nature, if you found any harmful backlinks from the spammy site, you should immediately contact to the site owner for your link removal. If you don't get any response from them, you must add their link into your disavow file.
Keep in mind, Disavow file is an advance feature inside your Google webmaster tool. You should use it carefully because using this feature incorrectly can harm your site's ranking on Google search. You should be well known that what types of links are low quality or spam. The easiest way is to read Google webmaster guidelines and if you think a link that doesn't comply with their guidelines disavow it. Here is a quick guide to submit disavow file into GMT.
Let you have a backlink from a quality link, and you think that the link is spammy and you disavow it. Do you have any idea what would be happen? Before disavow the link in question, I assume you have slightly better search rankings for your page ( let 0.3% results positively affected by the backlink). Once you disavow it then you may lost positive affect that was due to the link in question.
The better way is to sent an email to the site owner for your link removal, if you can't find any contact or don't get reply from them, you should consider to disavow this link by the following method.
What is a Disavow File?
Disavow file is a method by which you can notify to Google that the links in question should not be considered in their ranking factors or algorithm.Generally, the links pointing to your site to be considered in the search results. Two conditions can be apply here, one, if the incoming backlinks are from the quality sites you may get higher rankings, second, if the incoming links are from the lower quality sites or the sites that violate Google quality guidelines you may awarded by the penalties. Here is a quick guide to detect unnatural backlinks toward your site.
You should make a schedule to check your backlinks nature, if you found any harmful backlinks from the spammy site, you should immediately contact to the site owner for your link removal. If you don't get any response from them, you must add their link into your disavow file.
Keep in mind, Disavow file is an advance feature inside your Google webmaster tool. You should use it carefully because using this feature incorrectly can harm your site's ranking on Google search. You should be well known that what types of links are low quality or spam. The easiest way is to read Google webmaster guidelines and if you think a link that doesn't comply with their guidelines disavow it. Here is a quick guide to submit disavow file into GMT.
Let you have a backlink from a quality link, and you think that the link is spammy and you disavow it. Do you have any idea what would be happen? Before disavow the link in question, I assume you have slightly better search rankings for your page ( let 0.3% results positively affected by the backlink). Once you disavow it then you may lost positive affect that was due to the link in question.
How to Create a Disavow File?
Firstly, you need to collect the links pointing to your site that you think are harmful for your site. Let, you have found a link i.e., http://www.abc.com/main-page.html that you think it may hurt your site rankings.The better way is to sent an email to the site owner for your link removal, if you can't find any contact or don't get reply from them, you should consider to disavow this link by the following method.
- Go to your desktop, and create a new text document.
- Optional, you may rename it with your domain name without TLD. Some users also include the date so you may. i.e., bloggertipsseotricks for bloggertipsseotricks.com.
- Similar as many documents, disavow file also supports the comments tag. You must start your comment with "#". Let you want to include the above URL along with the comment tag then the valid disavow file would be,
# Contacted to the owners of following domains but
# got no response
http://www.abc.com/main-page.html
You must place a link to a line. This example is to disavow a particular link only. If you have bad links from a lot of the pages from a domain, you may disavow the entire domain by the following way. - If you want Google to ignore all the links from an entire domain, then just add (domain: anotherweb.com). We can easily add this line into our disavow file.
# Contacted to the owners of following domains but got no response.
http://www.abc.com/main-page.html
domain:anotherweb.com
Yes, I have sorted our comment in one line to explain to use another "#" tag if you need it into second line.
P.S: anotherweb.com is a root directory, all the links in sub-directory and sub-domain would be ignored by Google i.e., if the domain has a sub-domain blog.anotherweb.com then all the links placed in the sub-directory would also be ignored by Google. If you wish to confirm it by the official team you check +John Mueller comments.
P.S.S: Disavow a sub-domain doesn't mean disavow root domain or any other sub-domain. i.e., disavow blog.anotherweb.com doesn't mean disavow anotherweb.com or content.anotherweb.com.
Keep in mind, if you disavow the higher level domain (anotherweb.com), you don't need to disavow the lower level domain (blog.anotherweb.com). If you disavow both level domain, it would not cause any problem. - Once you have created a disavow file. You need to save it. You must encode the file type in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII. Here is a little tip how to encode it.
Click on File -> Save As... -> Select UTF-8 under Encoding -> Finally click on Save (You may save it to other directory with the same name) - Now, your disavow file is ready to use it into your Google Webmaster Tools.
