I will run through with you exactly how to disavow backlinks that may be harming your rankings on Google.
Sometimes you get high-quality backlinks to your website that make a huge impact on your rankings. But other times, you can get low-quality links going to your site either that you’ve built or that have just appeared by accident.
You can disavow these backlinks to get rid of them. If you’re worried that these are hurting your rankings or maybe you’ve received a penalty, then there’s an easy way to spot low-quality backlinks and get them removed from your backlinks profile.
Table of Contents
Create and Set Up Search Console
The first thing I will teach you today is to set up a search console account. Sign up for an account and then add a property (as shown below). You add the code onto your domain and then you can start disavowing links.
Identify Low-Quality and Spammy Links
Identify those low-quality links you do not want a link back from anymore. If you type in your website into ahrefs.com on the dashboard then once that loads you can check your backlink profile by clicking backlinks (as shown below).
You might also want to go through your existing backlinks and identify the ones that are low-quality and very spammy.
Check Relevance and Organic Traffic
If they offer no relevance, if they have a low amount of organic traffic, if they look like a particularly spammy website, then that’s a good time to get rid of them.
What you can do is go to Dofollow, and once that loads you can run through the traffic list and you are now looking for any links that look very spammy.
Let’s check and evaluate the quality of this page for example.
First of all, you can see that it’s not in the same language that my website is in. Also, it has very thin content.
Both the website design and overall content look very spammy. It doesn’t look like a website that someone would use naturally. This website got a broken link and overall it just doesn’t seem like a high-quality backlink.
Check Using Ahrefs
If I check this website in ahrefs.com, I can see that sure it’s a DR 91 website but at the same time this a sub-domain. The organic traffic is zero, so we can conclude that it is really a very low-quality link.
It isn’t really relevant, doesn’t really help my website, and it doesn’t offer any value. Therefore I don’t want this link associated with my site. What I will do next is to add this to my list of websites to disavow.
Disavow Tool Is Not For Beginners
Before you start disavowing backlinks to your website, you have to realize that this an advanced feature.
If you don’t really know what you’re doing or you don’t really understand which links are good and which links are bad, then I wouldn’t recommend using the disavow tool.
Because it’s not designed for beginners and honestly it won’t make a massive change to your rankings unless your receive a Google penalty or something you need to be concerned about when it comes to ranking a website.
But, if you still want to go ahead and start disavowing backlinks the actual tool is hard to find so just type in “disavow” into Google, and then you’ll find the link (as shown below).
Identify The Website
If you try and find it through your search console, it’s actually quite difficult to find that is why I recommend doing it this way since it is a lot simpler.
Then select the website on your search console that you want to disavow the link for. Then you’ll get this box below and you click on “disavow links”.
Google Warning
Now before you go ahead and disavow this link, you’re going to receive a warning from Google saying that they recommend only disavowing links if you believe there’s a lot of spammy links or artificial links, or low-quality links pointing to your site.
If you are really confident that these links are causing problems for your site because if they’re not then there’s probably no point in using the disavow tool.
Anyway, to go ahead and disavow links, click Choose File.
Then you must upload a text file that looks something like this
This is the template that Google gives you as an example of how to disavow links and what your text file should look like before you upload it to the search console.
Steps On How To Disavow Links
Now it’s time to start disavowing links, follow these steps:
1. Create a text file that we can upload to the search console, it will look something as shown below, and also the backlink that I no longer want in my backlink profile.
2.Copy that and then paste it into a Google Doc. You can download it as a TXT file, plain text. Once you’re done you can upload it to the search console. Then click submit. You’ve now uploaded a disavow file and it is pretty much as easy as that.
It only takes a few minutes to set this up. If you have lots of spammy links that you want to get rid of and you have a very bad backlink profile or you’ve been doing some sort of blackhat link building that you probably shouldn’t have been doing then you can upload a file like this and easily disavow all the links you want to get rid of.
Once you’re done, click “done” and there you go, you’re backlinks have been disavowed.
If you want to learn how to build high-quality backlinks and actually boost you’re rankings and grow your site, and please check out my YouTube channel and I think they’ll help you a lot.
