What to do with the Google Link Disavow Tool: Annulment or Divorce?

Link Disavow: Annulment or Divorce?

Things haven’t gone like you planned. Your website has some bad links pointing to it. You’ve toiled over your web design and content, but Google Penguin has affected your page rank. Google doesn’t look at you with the love it once did. The honeymoon is over and your digital marketing white hat isn’t as pristinely white as it once was. So what do you do? Counselling? Divorce? Disavow? Cry and eat your bodyweight in chocolate? How do you get back to on the path of true love?

All of the above… Kinda.

People, even with the best of intentions, can fall out of love. Sure, they’re probably fickle, self-centred people who lack empathy, suck at web design, and punch puppies, but it can happen. Why? It just does. Similarly, and perhaps more traumatically, Google can fall out of love with your website. Why? Well it’s like this: it’s not Google; it’s you. You need to stop punching puppies. Oh, and it’s Google too.

How is a page ranked?

Firstly, as most people understand by now, the Google algorithm (most recently updated by Penguin) will assess and rank your site and the only way to change your rank is to be more appealing to the algorithm.

Secondly, there are manual actions, whereby a human at Google can review your site and issues a penalty against it if you infringe a guideline, by using paid links, for example. In the case of such manual action, you will receive a notification to which you can respond with a ‘reconsideration request’ showing good faith in attempting to redress the problem.

Panic? Don’t mind if I do! 

If your page rank has suffered a recent blow, or if you have purchased a domain that has been poorly ranked due to its prior shady SEO tactics and dubious digital marketing; the best thing you can do, from Google’s point of view, is to try to remove offending links pointing to your site. This is the divorce. But, as we all know, this is not always possible. Negative SEO can be employed to hurt sites by intentionally pointing bad links to them to damage their page rank. So what can you do? Can a digital agency fix this Who do you turn to?

To answer this problem, Google has recently followed Bing’s lead and introduced the long-awaited disavowal function. This is the annulment. The disavowal tool acts as a way of signalling to Google how you view the links that are pointing to your site. You’re saying ‘mistakes were made, but we’ve all moved on, let’s just forget about it’. The process of discounting the links going to your site will not be immediate, with delays of several weeks being common, but in the end, things will hopefully improve.

Don’t panic! 

Before you decide to break up any relationship though, you want to be sure that there really is a problem. Disavowing links when your page rank hasn’t dropped may be seen as needlessly admitting that you haven’t been playing fair. Also, in trying to assess which links are bad and which are good, you could mistakenly discount links that are actually helping you and nobody wants to do that!

Irreconcilable Differences

Remember, if the love really is dead, and you do need to deal with questionable links, go for divorce first, and only if that doesn’t work, annulment. That might sound harsh, but if you work at it, there’s no reason you can’t find the Google love again.