An informal and unscientific poll on Twitter shows that most SEOs largely ignore spammy links, rather than taking the time to deny them. Subsequent comments were in line with the poll’s findings, but some SEOs shared how their approach was more nuanced and why rejection made sense for them in specific situations.
link disavowal tool
Google provides a tool through the Search Console that allows publishers and SEOs to tell Google to ignore specific links.
After the release of the Penguin algorithm, Google created the disavow tool in 2012 at the request of the SEO community to deal with the high volume of paid links and other linking schemes that SEOs are involved in.
The Penguin algorithm penalizes sites with paid links and other low-quality links that the publishers themselves build.
In order to regain the ranking of penalized sites, SEOs and publishers must demand that all spammy links they create be removed.
But those requests to remove links are ignored, or sometimes sites ask for money to remove them, which can become unreasonably expensive.
The SEO community asked for an easy way to reject links that couldn’t be removed, and Google provided it.
The disavowal tool announcement makes it clear that the tool is used for links created by publishers and SEOs themselves, and to get rid of the “unnatural link” penalty.
2012 Google Rejection Tool Notice statement:
“The main purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you hire bad SEO or make mistakes in your own link building.
…if despite your best efforts you are unable to remove some backlinks, then this is a good time to use the Disavow Links tool. “
Later announcements noted that Google ignored links that were often associated with “negative SEO” and that publishers were not required to use disavowal tools for random links they were not responsible for.
However, many publishers and SEOs worry about negative SEO and random weird links and deny them anyway.
Most SEOs ignore spam links
The poll was conducted by Sarah McDowell (@SarahMcDUK)
It’s important to note that only 182 people responded to this poll, which cannot be said to be a representative cross-section of the average SEO practitioner.
Still, it’s an interesting poll, as the results are heavily skewed toward ignoring spam links.
Voting results
Ignore spam links: 65.5%
Reject spam links: 33.5%
Google says they ignore “spam” links to your site, in general, do you ignore them too, or do you go the deny route just to be on the safe side?
I’m not including the “depends on” option because I want a general rule of thumb 👍#Search Engine Optimization #twittervote
— Sarah McDowell (she/she) (@SarahMcDUK) February 17, 2022
What SEO actually does may be more subtle
Judging from the discussion comments in the poll thread, it seems that SEOs use the disavow tool in a more nuanced way than the binary choice of ignore or disavow.
Several commenters cited specific criteria or thresholds that would prompt them to decline.
One worries about overly commercialized anchor text:
I reject anything with an unnatural spam/commercial anchor and ignore the rest. Imagine how many teams of people it takes for a large corporate website to refuse to crawl links all day long! That’s why I don’t think it matters, but it’s better to deny the obvious.
— Lee Foot 🐍📈 (@LeeFootSEO) February 17, 2022
Others worry about the threshold for total links:
If there are more than 30% spam links, I will reject them. If it’s only 5-10%, I don’t think it makes sense. In any case, the rejection is not that time-consuming compared to actually evaluating the link. So if I’ve done a link review, I’ll most likely add a disavow file.
— Irina_Serdyukovskaya (@irina_kudres) February 18, 2022
Google will most likely ignore them anyway, but if I see them making up a large portion (>60-70%) of my backlink profile, I’ll still reject them just to be on the safe side…. ..
– Despina Fronimaki (@fronimaki) February 18, 2022
Others argue that Google’s technology is good enough to identify bad links:
I could not care less. It’s their job to clean up junk mail. Although until the tool helps them now, I think it’s completely naive to think that SEOs with spreadsheets can judge links better than Google ML and won’t get covered anyway.
— Fabrizio Ballarini – recruitingwise.jobs (@Pechnet) February 18, 2022
It should be reiterated that opinion polls may not be entirely accurate.However, a surprisingly high percentage of SEOs who responded that they ignored spammy links, and possible Changes in the way disavowal tools are handled on behalf of the SEO community and increased confidence in how Google handles link spam.
