Disavow
Rejecting or rejecting an incoming link is called disavowing. This has to do with an important part of marketing your Web shop: link building. In link building, links are placed to your website through other websites for SEO optimization. When such a backlink is of poor quality and/or high spam content, it can actually be bad for your SEO.
The problem with these types of links lies in the fact that you cannot quickly remove them. The disavow option within Google Search Console allows you to ignore backlinks. As a result, search engines do not read these links so your ranking within the search engine is not lowered after indexing.
Add Disavow
To apply the handy option of disavow to backlinks with negative impact, you can follow this roadmap:
- Use a link explorer tool such as Moz to examine which links have too high a spam rate
- Next, create a txt file where you insert the URLs or domains that should be rejected. One domain or URL per line, prefix domain with 'domain', file name should contain .txt and the text file should be encoded in UTF. Have the it team do this if you don't know about it yourself
- Upload the txt file containing the list of wrong URLs and domains into your Google Search Console. Find the disavow tool, choose your website and click "Reject links. Finally, choose the txt file to apply disavow
Disavow check in cache
How can you be sure that Google disavow has effectively applied the incorrect backlinks? To check cached links in bulk you can use the tool: Scrapebox's Google Cache Extractor Addon. Suppose you don't have that many links to check the cache of, there are also ways to do this on an individual basis. You can see this from a page's cache and through a search for the backlink page. A page to which disavow has been applied should be visible in the cache.
In addition, you can do a search by date to see if Google has changed its index. Put the URL in quotes in Google and click on the green arrow that appears in the search result. Here you can then click on "In cache." It will then reveal the date the page was last cached, ensuring that disavow has been applied correctly.
