Matt Cutts the head of anti-spam at Google announced in a video (shown below) that Google has just released a Link Disavow Tool. This tool has been sought after by the Webmaster community for some time in attempt to protect a site from links originating from poor quality sites.
Let me explain, up until now any site could link to your site without your permission and essentially affect your search engine rankings. If the site was a good quality relevant site then the affect would be positive but if the site was low quality and irrelevant then it would have a negative affect.
By releasing the Link Disavow Tool Google is helping business owners to mark sites, which are linking to them without permission, as links the site does not want. This is a positive step forward for Google and businesses that rely on Google as you now have a tool to combat unethical practices. Practices where competitors will link spam links to your site in order to lower your rankings.
You can get the full details from Matt Cutts himself in this video below:
Why Is This Announcement Important?
If you’re an SEO client of Think Big Online this announcement doesn’t really affect you as we only undertake ethical and Google Guideline compliant SEO. The main sites this update is affecting is the sites who were too aggressive with their SEO and built low quality links.
Sites which have been penalized for this and that have been working to remove these links can now use the Link Disavow Tool to help them achieve their goal. With that said it also has a purpose of protecting sites from malicious links from aggressive competitors.
If you’d like to discuss this more for your particular situation just leave a comment below and we’ll get in touch.
