Thinking about using Disavow? STOP!

I am starting to see more and more newbies talking about disavowing links with Google.

A lot of people have been hit by the latest algorithm but I can't stress enough to you that Disavow is not the answer.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what disavow does.

Firstly, it's not a miracle cure.

You need to think about the purpose of disavow... it's not there to help you! You need to trust me on this.

Think of your website as the 'snitch'.

You get penalised, google dangles the 'disavow' carrot suggesting that by using it and working hard to remove your links you may have your penalty lifted.

Your site essentially becomes an 'informant' and by working for google you may get a 'lesser sentence' rewarded by MAYBE reinstating your site (and more often than not they won't reinstate your site for months...or never even after you do all the hard work).

The next time you think about disavowing I want you to remember this post and think long and hard about what disavow actually does.

Disavow is a crowd sourced method that helps google gather information free of charge to help them understand even more information about link building they have not already factored into their algorithm.

They are using your services for free to help them understand link building methods and link farms they have not already captured.

By feeding information over to disavow what you are actually doing is helping them prepare for the next algorithm (whether its major or minor).

In summary, stop using disavow FFS!

Right on my man. I read this somewhere else I believe.... But this makes sense to me. Otherwise, by what other means would they figure out our link building strategies?

I'm glad someone else shares the same point of view. I never trusted this tool, we're all just saying to G: "Hey, this website is spammed with links, and this one, and this one, and so on..."

As true as it is, your speech will only fall on deaf ears. There are so many peoples here and on every other IM blog/forum who overlooks the Disavow tool and I'm talking only about the true experts in SEO.

As you said, Google doesn't have enough manpower to weed out the spammy links both manually and algorithmically so they put in the Disavow tool to collect all the links that US the webmasters/marketers/business owners think are hurting our rankings. At the end, Google got what they want - Hundreds of Millions of user-generated backlink data that are pure spam and provides no-value to any internet user.

Their penalty system for Penguin will be withdrawn in the near future. As much as we worry about Penguin updates penalizing our money sites, there are thousands of business owners frustrated about their sites getting penalized/deindexed due to a Neg SEO attack. Google needs to fix it soon. But before that, they'll need to sort out all those backlinks and pull the footprints from those spammy pages and insert it into their Algorithm. When done and fine-tuned; in future, their algorithm will simply ignore these links which effectively block the link juice we get thus making it harder to rank easily with automated backlink tools.

The other side of the card is the SAPE/PBN's which used to work until Google deindexed them. The only other way to rank with BH SEO is to get high PR contextual backlinks and this is the reason why they stopped updating the PR to stop us from hunting high PR links and spam them too.

SEO is an art which can't be mastered by anyone and one who learnt the working method to rank sites should keep it themselves. Bringing it to public and marketing them will eventually make it die sooner than ever before.

Tools like scrapebox and xrumer brought great results in the past. Sadly GSA will also become the thing of the past very soon. Peoples who tasted the results of these push-button tools simply don't have enough patience to build quality contextual backlinks. They want it fast which won't last.

FBGuru said:

As true as it is, your speech will only fall on deaf ears. There are so many peoples here and on every other IM blog/forum who overlooks the Disavow tool and I'm talking only about the true experts in SEO.

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Sad but true. More awareness needs to be raised by the blackhat community about this.

I've been saying this shit for years. Nobody listens. The stupid white hat sites tote the disavow tool as if its the viagra for their impotence.

The disavow was created solely for the purpose of refining penguin. Finding all of the URL strings and patterns of mass produced garbage links which in turn will come back to bite them in the ass.

Why do you think so many people post on the webmaster forums about how the disavow ruined their rankings? Wake up!

The only way to fix the problem is to remove links, not piss into the wind and hope it doesn't spray you.

Well, if you were google, you'd probably do the same and ask people do the dirty job for you so for this I have no problem with google.
I have learned the hard way not to rely much on google traffic (well, in 2012 I did WP theme which became popular so I got millions of footer links, it's well deserved credit for me as I did something great and people loved it, but unfortunately google thought otherwise and penalised my site for having so many links with the same anchor text).

This time I got hit again but I care less about it... almost all my links actually drive traffic so the lost traffic from google will be easily replaced by a few more links (I contribute to relevant websites and they link back to me), this time I have links from reuters and such but I still got penalised LOL.

I think if you do a proper authority website then you shouldn't rely on google for traffic... back in 2010 or 2011, somebody said that if you want to be authority then you shouldn't rely just on google and those are the wisest words I've heard.
with this penalty or whatever is happening there... google just make themselves look stupid as they are listing outdated stuff on the first page (yeah, in my niche sites are there which provide outdated information and they can't be arsed to change it).

So my point is... why would I even bother to disavow anything. I don't have time to make google happy and neither do they.
as OP said... smart people let google figure that crap (it's google who crawl the shyte sites which are covered with spam, so let them figure it).

PS: last edit from me, I promise... thought, I'd include that I had 2 negative seo attempts and I guess, it worked at the end and my rankings crushed.

SinfulPromotions said:

Otherwise, by what other means would they figure out our link building strategies?

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In all fairness this is a public forum that people come to to discuss strategies to rank on google, sell/buy link building strategies, and discuss how to evolve that strategy through the updates, they wouldn't have search that hard would they?

As long as people insist on outing their techniques and selling packages in public, you're doing it right under googles' nose.
It needs to be done much more carefully because doing it out in public is very sloppy.

Don't get me wrong, I think this forum is great, but business (ideally) should be done in private

I used it for a website before got a manual action and I didn't see movement in SERP.

According to me if any site get penalized then just leave it and start working on a new one, I do the same as I know If I work according to Google guidelines then I wont be able to make money for years and if I do black hat seo and get good rankings within a month and after 3-4 month my site get penalized then I wont be worried as by that time i have had made the money which I make in years after doing good work. So dont look at Google updates, just keep working.