I sometimes hear from people who are concerned about proactively submitting a disavow file for any reason, thinking it might signal to Google as either a spam signal or some kind of flag that alerts Google to have a closer look at the site’s backlinks.
But is it a valid concern or not? The question came up on Twitter and Gary Illyes from Google addressed the concern.
No
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) August 2, 2017
This does make a lot of sense. Perhaps the site was hacked and a hacker pointed a ton of links to the hacked site to get it to rank better. Or perhaps it was due to a former SEO or link builder and now the site is deciding to clean up its act proactively before it gets hit by Google algorithmically or with a manual action. Or maybe it was a ad campaign that was inadvertently setup with followed links, and the site owner wants to follow the webmaster guidelines as closely as possible by disavowing if getting a nofollow wasn’t an option.
A disavow can also be a great tool for simple “peace of mind”, for those who want to be able to immediately disavow a dodgy link the moment it first shows up, something many site owners do on a very regular basis without it causing any kind of issue or flag with Google. So it wouldn’t make sense for Google to punish those site owners who are watching new inbound links carefully.
So feel free to submit your disavow with Google, without being worried that there will be repercussions for doing so.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020