What is a Disavow file?

A great way of making sure that Google knows which links to ignore

A Disavow file is a text (.txt) file that you can submit to Google asking them to ignore some of the links pointing to your website. It's great to use if you're under attack from negative SEO. We may have sent you an alert informing you about this. Even if you are not under attack it’s always good to monitor your links and make sure that any dodgy looking links are disavowed. It will show Google that you’re taking an active interest in your link profile which is also good.

Finding your bad links

The most time consuming but important part of the process

You will need to go through your link profile and distinguish which links are good and which are bad. We believe the best link checker is Majestic SEO. If you feel that you have been impacted by a negative SEO campaign then you can sort the data within Majestic over the last 30 days using their “fresh index”.



You can also export your data out of Majestic in to Excel. This will make it easy to go through and highlight any links that you feel are spammy.



NB - We highly recommend going through and checking each link manually. It’s time consuming but if you disavow a link that is not spam then it could harm your ranking. Within Majestic there is also the ability to sort your links by anchor text which can come in very handy as this will identify any obviously spammy links.

The type of links you are looking for consist of spammy blogs, posts where the anchor text does is not relevant to your product/service and links that look automatically generated.

Create the file

Just a copy and paste away

Simply create a .txt file in notepad and list each of the bad links as follows:

Submitting it to Google

The easy bit!

Just follow the steps at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

NB - You have to be logged in to your Google Webmaster Tools to submit it. If you have not signed up to Google Webmaster Tools then you would have to do so.

We can do it for you!

If you don't have the time, don't worry, we can do it for you!

The cost depends on the number of links you have. So just get in touch to get the ball rolling.