Alternatives To Disavow Tool | Remove Spammy Backlinks
Table of Contents
Alternatives To Disavow Tool
Hey readers, today’s topic is related to marketing and is especially important for SEO. Today’s topic is about the tool which most of us SEO’s use, but nowadays its use is getting less and less by the day. This tool is important because it lets us clear our domain names before the google penguin crawler.
Suppose any spammy or unrelated website is linked to your company site. In that case, the penguin crawler may penalize your area, and to protect your site from such predicaments, you use the disavow tool. But does the disavow tool even work, and are there any alternatives to disavow tools? Let’s see how else we can remove spammy backlinks, or do you even need the disavow Tool anymore.
Do You Need The Disavow Tool
The disavow tool is a legacy feature of Google Search Console. Meaning it is one of the few features left for the old version of the console, but you can not access this tool directly from the console itself. To access the disavow tool, you have to do a google search for it, and then you will get the tool at the top of the SERP. Over the years, this tool has been very helpful for SEOs.
But since Google has launched its domain property feature, the disavow tools have become a bit obsolete. Since it doesn’t work with this domain property feature, you can’t disavow the bad links to your URL. The disavow tool is made to work with only URL prefixes and not with domain properties. So this makes the whole concept of the disavow tool pointless.
Google does say that they have updated and upgraded their algorithms enough to detect which is a bad link to your site and ignore it. This can go different ways.
What Are URL Prefixes?
A URL prefix is a variation of your domain URL. These are the variants of your URL that whenever a google bot visits, one of them will be redirected to your canonical URL. The variation can include the following.
Yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com
What Are Domain Properties?
Google decided to make their search console a bit more manageable and cleaner. This led to the development of domain properties. When you verify your site as a domain property, Google gather’s data from all the URL variations, not just from a particular 1.
Disavow Tool Doesn’t Work With Domain Properties.
Since we know that the disavow tool is made to disavow links to any of your particular URL prefixes. To stop links to all variations of your website, you will have to verify all these variants of your URL in the search console. Then you will have to create multiple disavow files, every file containing the links you want to disavow for only 1 particular URL prefix.
The disavow tool doesn’t work with domain properties due to the different functionalities. Where domain property gathers data from all variable URL prefixes, but disavow is made to disavow links for 1 URL prefix at a time. The disavow tool will not work for domain properties unless it is upgraded to disavow links for the domain and all variable URL prefixes simultaneously.
Is There Any Other Way?
The best way you can reduce the impact of these bad links on your site is by keeping a record of the links you made. Consider a scenario where you made hundreds of links on your site, but after some time, some of the areas that link to your site have become spammy or are not present anymore in your related niche. You need to access your accounts on those sites and remove these links. Once the link is removed, delete the account.
But what about if you linked without an account? Well, now you have to contact the site administrator and ask them to remove it. This can take a lot of time and could backfire as the owner of that account may demand money from you to remove that link. Google claims that its algorithm can detect authentic links and be bought or placed with bad intentions. So you may not need the disavow tool at all.
Final Conclusion
From my observation, you can only keep using the disavow tool by verifying your site with URL prefixes. It looks like Google is planning to ax the disavow tool as its use, according to Google, has now become obsolete. It does not look like google is upgrading the disavow tool to stop bad links for domain properties. Because if they were going to, they would have done it already.
Right now, there is no alternative to disavow the tool except to be careful when placing a link. If someone targeted your site with a fake link attack, then trusting google for interpreting this situation right. Link building is not the only way to increase site rankings. To check out more techniques, tips, and strategies, check out our digital marketing blog.
