Disavow File - Why, How and When to be Used?
Disavow File - Why, How and When to be Used?
For web masters and website owners, it is very important to know what the disavow file is, why it exists, and how and when to be used. You know, for a website, links are the significant ranking signals. If you want to remain on the top of quality of your website's link profile, you need to disavow the links of low quality websites. It will make you competitive in the organic search.
What is the disavow file?
Disavow file a tool that allows site owners or webmasters to ask Google not to take specific links into account. Actually through the disavow file you ask Google to disavow spammy or low quality links or attributes when Google determines the quality of your website's link profile. Google wants webmasters to remove bad links of lower sites before using this disavowing file or tool. Cleaning up the unnatural links to your site is utmost important, only disavowing poor links through disavowing tool is not enough.
Why was disavow file introduced?
Google's official stance on disavow file is that you may have historically built paid or bad links on your website by a previous SEO agency that you had no control over. These bad links on your website can violate Google Algorithm's quality guidelines, and so your site can be punished as a result of it.
Penguin Updates about Disavow Files - Devalues vs Demotes
With the new changes in new Penguin 4.0 launch, webmasters need to understand the requirement of disavow file. According to this new Algorithm (Penguin), Google will no longer demotes your websites but rather it will devalue.
To make you understand these two technical terms, "Demote and Devalue", there is explanation defining them. Demote means that Google would lower your website's ranking for doing something bad. While Devalue means that it would ignore the bad and spam links on your website, but it would not downgrade the ranking of your website.
It means that devaluing the link is just as ignoring the bad links on the website. As we have earlier mentioned that disavow file or tool does the same thing at your website. So as per the new Panguin 4.0, you need not put disavow file on your site for Penguin, however there are bunch of things that can require such a tool.
When to use the disavow file?
There are a few scenarios when you must use the disavow file. Of course, you still require the disavow files for other link penalties, like the manual actions but it doesn't seem any webmaster needs it for Penguin. If you have received a manual penalty warning from Google, no doubt that you require to use the disavow file on your website when facing this situation.
