Story Based Question
Imagine you run a popular online store selling eco-friendly products. One day, you notice a significant drop in search rankings and a decrease in website traffic. Upon checking your backlink profile, you find that numerous spammy, irrelevant sites are linking to you. These links are harming your website’s credibility, but you’re unsure how to deal with them.
You’ve heard of a disavow file but aren’t sure what it is or how to use it. “What exactly is a disavow file, and how can it help me protect my site from Negative SEO?”
Exact Answer
A disavow file is a file you create and submit to Google to tell them to ignore specific harmful backlinks pointing to your site. It’s used to prevent Negative SEO by telling search engines to disregard low-quality or spammy links that could hurt your rankings.
Explanation
When you’re building backlinks, some links may come from spammy, irrelevant, or harmful sources. These links can trigger penalties from search engines, lowering your site’s rankings and causing your traffic to drop. A disavow file is a tool that allows you to ask Google to ignore these harmful backlinks, thus protecting your site from penalties related to Negative SEO.
Here’s how it works:
- Identifying Harmful Backlinks
First, you’ll need to identify the bad backlinks pointing to your site. Tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush can help you analyze your backlink profile and find spammy or irrelevant links. - Creating a Disavow File
Once you’ve identified harmful links, you can create a disavow file. This file is a simple text document that lists the URLs or domains you want Google to ignore. Each URL or domain you want to disavow should be listed on a new line, prefixed with “domain:” if you want to disavow all links from a specific domain (e.g., domain:spamsite.com). - Submitting the Disavow File to Google
After creating the disavow file, you’ll need to upload it to Google Search Console. In the Disavow Links section of the tool, you can submit the file to tell Google to disregard the harmful links. - Google Processes the Disavow File
After submission, Google will review your disavow file and, over time, will start ignoring the harmful backlinks. This process can take some time, but it helps protect your site from penalties that could result from Negative SEO attacks.
Example
Let’s say you run the eco-friendly store and discover dozens of spammy backlinks pointing to your site from unrelated niches like gambling and payday loans. After using a tool like Ahrefs, you see that these backlinks are harming your site’s authority.
- Identify Harmful Backlinks: You download your backlink report from Ahrefs and identify low-quality domains like spamsite.com and randombacklinker.com linking to your site.
- Create the Disavow File: You open a text editor and create a disavow file that looks like this:
domain:spamsite.com
domain:randombacklinker.com - Submit the Disavow File to Google: You log in to Google Search Console and go to the Disavow Links tool. You upload the disavow file, telling Google to ignore the harmful backlinks.
- Monitor Results: After a few weeks, you notice your rankings start to recover, as Google no longer considers the spammy backlinks in its algorithm. Your site traffic stabilizes, and you regain some of your lost visibility.