What is a Disavow File?

Link Building is a great way to building your website’s popularity both with Google and people finding your site and being referred from other sites.

Hours can be spent dealing with guest bloggers, forums, directories and partnering sites arranging links that mention and recommend your site, and the rewards can be notable, however there’s also risk!

In the past, the emphasis was on sheer quantity of links to your site with little regard for relevance and therefore quality. In more recent times, Google has taken a firm stand on this and the quality of links to your site is now more important than ever.

Good high quality links in to your site with a good Page Rank can be of enormous benefit, low quality links with a low Page Rank can seriously harm your site and in some cases get your site penalised.

This is where Google Webmaster Tools comes in with a useful feature that allows you to control how Google sees the links that point to your website using a Disavow File.

What is a Disavow File?

A disavow file is a method in which you can notify Google that you do not wish links pointing to your site to be considered in their algorithm.

Sometimes you have links which break Google guidelines pointing to your site, these can come from poor SEO techniques or from competitor malpractice. Poor quality links can be harming how visible your site is in Google. So if you are making an effort to clean up your link profile and protect your site for future algorithm updates, you can submit a disavow file which highlights which links these are.

For more information or advice on Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building call 01727 739812.