This should be a sticky: Do NOT use Google Disavow Tool

I know there have been a few threads about the disavow tool, but the purpose of this thread is exclusively a warning:

Do NOT use it.

Why?

Because Google is trying to use us all against eachother. If we all use it, and 'snitch' on eachother, soon Google will have a giant library of backlinks that they see as low quality, thanks to all users of their tool. They don't even need to algorithmically detect anything anymore, it's simple, if enough people list backlinks in the disavow tool, then no one will be able to use those backlinks in the future, and possibly with enough reports that entire domain will be blacklisted.

You may think you will benefit if you submit all your links to the disavow tool to get out of a penalty, but if everyone does this the long term effects will be that you can no longer build backlinks of your own, because they would all be blacklisted. Entire SEO services could be ruined, because you could get the service, disavow all their backlinks and bam, the entire backlink profile/footprint of that service is blacklisted. I have a couple sites hit by Penguin, am I going to disavow all their links to save a measly few sites? Hell no, I would rather they stay slapped than contribute to ruining things for myself and other SEOers as a whole.

Essentially Google is using webmasters to create their own self-destruction. Maybe this warning would not be enough for dumbass WF members who are salivating at the prospect of taking their 50 cents a day adsense site out of a penalty, but I think BHW people have more sense.

How many of these posts do we need?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/493274-why-google-disavow-bad-news-us-all.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/494189-new-google-disavow-tool-remove-unwanted-backlinks-sounds-fishy.html

Google has a very poor record with the use of data which is why the EU and other Governments are after them...

If you use this tool you label yourself as doing something you shouldn't have been doing in google's eyes. They will file the information and at some point in the future if it suits them use it against you or the site concerned.

Market expectations re earnings for PPC are down, this affects their bottom line and market confidence in their product. Expect the gloves to come off and for them to stop at nothing to recoup that......

I've been thinking about this, too. I won't use the tool since it's certainly not my job to fix Google's problems.

Google's masterplan is putting us out of business to make us pay for our rankings via AdWords. Easy moniez for Big G.

MaxTucker said:

How many of these posts do we need?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...93274-why-google-disavow-bad-news-us-all.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...l-remove-unwanted-backlinks-sounds-fishy.html

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Read the first line of this thread. It's not for discussion. There needs to be a thread with a title that instructs people not to use it, not simply threads which discuss or suggest possible dangers. This tool must unequivocally NOT be used. End of story.

I have already headed over to the dark side and used it, Lets see what happens

jb2008 said:

Read the first line of this thread. It's not for discussion. There needs to be a thread with a title that instructs people not to use it, not simply threads which discuss or suggest possible dangers. This tool must unequivocally NOT be used. End of story.

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This is not that thread.

Smeems said:

This is not that thread.

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Who are you to determine what thread is valid and what is not? If this thread stops people from destroying entire libraries of backlinks and thus helping Google and matt cutts despite being supposed BHers, then it has served its purpose. However, of course, I would be more than happy for a moderator to make his own warning thread and sticky it. In fact I would much prefer that. We have 2 general discussion threads on this topic on BHW - how many threads do we have in the BH SEO section on AMR, for example? Something like this has far greater implications for SEO than a measly article marketing tool or indeed any other SEO tool. It's essentially negative SEO on steroids. Everyone who uses the tool, intentionally or not, is effectively an unpaid employee of the Google algorithm.

jb2008 said:

Read the first line of this thread. It's not for discussion. There needs to be a thread with a title that instructs people not to use it, not simply threads which discuss or suggest possible dangers. This tool must unequivocally NOT be used. End of story.

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It's not for discussion.

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Really? Nice of you to tell us...

What Scritty? Do you actually think Google would NOT use this data against us? Your blog post on the matter of course addresses that Google doesn't know what it's doing and is using its webmasters to clean up the mess they made for them, however it does not cover how Google will use this data. And no, I believe it is not up for discussion as to whether or not we as BHers should use this tool. You did not address the most important issue in your blog post, but most recently noble samurai did it well. Widespread use of this tool would be disastrous, especially if people undertake negative SEO using it. Their earnings are going down, they are doing everything they can to punish manipulation of the SERPs, the slew of recent updates has been very harsh even by G's standards. By now people should realise that G only cares about profits and they will do whatever it takes. The most efficient way for them is to get everyone else to do it for them, it costs nothing. Some may say this is an overly pessimistic or suspicious view of Google and its intentions, but if we learn anything from the past 6 months, the trend is toward further penalizations, further restricting what webmasters can/can't do to gain rankings. All I can do is give the warning to people, if no one listens then Google will have succeeded in using us all against eachother, and SEO as we know it will be over. If you think this is too pessimistic let's see what happens in a few months after half the webmasters on the WF use this tool. For my sake I hope I am wrong but this is Google, so I doubt it.

The problem is that blackhat is now mainstream. Webmasters who use blackhat techniques have no right to complain when their sites go down and generally didn't years ago but the commercialization of these ranking methods have brought a slew of idiots into the game. These people refuse to take responsibility for risks. It's fine to own both black hat and white hat sites but you can't have it both ways with the same site. I cannot believe the amount of people on this forum who can't grasp this simple, basic concept.

These fools who want to "give the tool a chance" -- good luck convincing them. They don't seem to have any long term thinking ability. They don't seem to notice trends either. Despite this, I think the message should be a sticky anyway.

Google is an inimical creature, not friendly at all. They set up this so called negative SEO to discourage webmasters from optimizing their sites through backlinking as that is 'fake' and 'manipulative', how the hell do you think businesses are going to survive? Then they open this disavowing tool for the public advising to upload list of low quality links leaving us confused, trying to guess which links shall be discounted and given that unnatural linking is against the guidelines, you'll never know, making people shatter the rankings of their own sites to generate more bullcrap in the top rankings for more advertising revenues for the creature.

I keep seeing this argument that Google is trying to force small businesses and website owners in to using adwords, while big brands get to dominate the SERPS. Take a minute to think about it.

Who has the budget to run large scale PPC campaigns? Certainly not the majority of website owners. It's the big companies that are being 'unfairly' rewarded with good rankings. Where is the benefit of sending them free traffic through organic search when they could hammer the site and force them to up their PPC budget?

Anyway, the disavow tool. Bottom line is that no one really knows what impact it will have, everything is speculation as usual. Wait a few weeks until the next penguin refresh, then we'll compare notes to see if it has helped on hindered anyone.

stubo1903 said:

I keep seeing this argument that Google is trying to force small businesses and website owners in to using adwords, while big brands get to dominate the SERPS. Take a minute to think about it.

Who has the budget to run large scale PPC campaigns? Certainly not the majority of website owners. It's the big companies that are being 'unfairly' rewarded with good rankings. Where is the benefit of sending them free traffic through organic search when they could hammer the site and force them to up their PPC budget?

Anyway, the disavow tool. Bottom line is that no one really knows what impact it will have, everything is speculation as usual. Wait a few weeks until the next penguin refresh, then we'll compare notes to see if it has helped on hindered anyone.

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A very valid point and which perhaps goes some ways to explain why goog PPC earnings are down.

Discussed at more length http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ogle-misses-earning-expectations-rejoice.html

Sorry, but failing to use the tools just leaves all the do-gooders using it, providing Google the info they want and helping those people clean up their Penguin disaster sites.

If I've got someone needing help cleanup their own Penguin disaster, and emailing removal requests to site owners hasn't helped, I'm not going to tell them to throw away their domain name, branding and history just to satisfy your paranoia.

Instead, I'm going to help them file the disavow request, intentionally mixing in "good" links with bad ones, giving Google as much disninformation as possible while helping that person get their site back to earning money.

Telling people not to use the tool is akin to telling them not to drive because it hurts the environment or not to eat because it could make them fat. Sorry, but Pandora has opened the box. Now it's time to mitigate our losses, get back to earning money, and work smarter about building links.

Remove the chaff and focus on growing wheat. No, I don't mean white hat link building a la Rand. I mean building quality links which will pass a manual review - however that needs to be done!

stubo1903 said:

I keep seeing this argument that Google is trying to force small businesses and website owners in to using adwords, while big brands get to dominate the SERPS. Take a minute to think about it.

Who has the budget to run large scale PPC campaigns? Certainly not the majority of website owners. It's the big companies that are being 'unfairly' rewarded with good rankings. Where is the benefit of sending them free traffic through organic search when they could hammer the site and force them to up their PPC budget?

Anyway, the disavow tool. Bottom line is that no one really knows what impact it will have, everything is speculation as usual. Wait a few weeks until the next penguin refresh, then we'll compare notes to see if it has helped on hindered anyone.

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Neither of them, all are forced to use their PPC system, which in turn is not good either, I started a campaign recently and 25 clicks were never registered in the stats.

n2zen said:

Sorry, but failing to use the tools just leaves all the do-gooders using it, providing Google the info they want and helping those people clean up their Penguin disaster sites.

If I've got someone needing help cleanup their own Penguin disaster, and emailing removal requests to site owners hasn't helped, I'm not going to tell them to throw away their domain name, branding and history just to satisfy your paranoia.

Instead, I'm going to help them file the disavow request, intentionally mixing in "good" links with bad ones, giving Google as much disninformation as possible while helping that person get their site back to earning money.

Telling people not to use the tool is akin to telling them not to drive because it hurts the environment or not to eat because it could make them fat. Sorry, but Pandora has opened the box. Now it's time to mitigate our losses, get back to earning money, and work smarter about building links.

Remove the chaff and focus on growing wheat. No, I don't mean white hat link building a la Rand. I mean building quality links which will pass a manual review - however that needs to be done!

Click to expand...

Finally someone with some sense.

stubo1903 said:

I keep seeing this argument that Google is trying to force small businesses and website owners in to using adwords, while big brands get to dominate the SERPS. Take a minute to think about it.

Who has the budget to run large scale PPC campaigns? Certainly not the majority of website owners. It's the big companies that are being 'unfairly' rewarded with good rankings. Where is the benefit of sending them free traffic through organic search when they could hammer the site and force them to up their PPC budget?

Anyway, the disavow tool. Bottom line is that no one really knows what impact it will have, everything is speculation as usual. Wait a few weeks until the next penguin refresh, then we'll compare notes to see if it has helped on hindered anyone.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't believe that either. It could be true that G wants to force more small website owners to use AdWords, but that's just a theory. I think they are most concerned with manipulation of the SERPs for results quality purposes and hence user retention, that's it. And like I said, they will do whatever it takes to remain the #1 search engine, as it is the core of their business. Without it they are nothing and they know it. Hence, with regard to Google's intentions, you should always err on the side of caution and see it from the view of ruthless profit maximization, and that's it. As Junkfood rightly stated, "Google is an inimical creature" - an excellent way of putting it. As is true with any company, the bigger they get, the more aggressive they become in protecting their profits and the more resources they have to do so. However, 100% accurate detection of link spam and search engine manipulation in general is something that is so widespread and complex that it is not economically viable for Google to do algorithmically. Penguin "succeeded" in the sense that some link spam was hit, but many high quality sites with high quality backlinks (or those hit by intentional negative SEO) were also shot in the crossfire. It unleashed further chaos, and didn't lead to necessarily better results. These days I am seeing a more random mashup of crap at the top of the SERPs, with big brand sub pages generally dominating even if they are not the most relevant pages for the query. You're right, no one knows 100% for certain what will happen, but Google will undoubtedly store this data and most probably use it eventually to blacklist entire domains whose links are widely reported in the disavowal tool. This tool could conceivably 'achieve' what matt cutts and co have been trying to do for years, if enough people end up using it.

n2zen said:

Sorry, but failing to use the tools just leaves all the do-gooders using it, providing Google the info they want and helping those people clean up their Penguin disaster sites.

If I've got someone needing help cleanup their own Penguin disaster, and emailing removal requests to site owners hasn't helped, I'm not going to tell them to throw away their domain name, branding and history just to satisfy your paranoia.

Instead, I'm going to help them file the disavow request, intentionally mixing in "good" links with bad ones, giving Google as much disninformation as possible while helping that person get their site back to earning money.

Telling people not to use the tool is akin to telling them not to drive because it hurts the environment or not to eat because it could make them fat. Sorry, but Pandora has opened the box. Now it's time to mitigate our losses, get back to earning money, and work smarter about building links.

Remove the chaff and focus on growing wheat. No, I don't mean white hat link building a la Rand. I mean building quality links which will pass a manual review - however that needs to be done!

Click to expand...

A lot of people would have considered a warning to the effects and properties of the Penguin update as paranoia, it was indeed a very punitive update. As I have said many times, Google's profits are suffering, they will be more aggressive against link spam as time goes by in order to protect the core of their business.

Yes, you are right that the 'do-gooders' will use it and that's the main problem I think. I only posted this warning on BHW because I generally like the guys here and I think BHW members are intelligent enough to appreciate what's going on. The main danger is, I concede, members of forums like WF and DP and the hordes of webmasters and even SEO companies who don't have a clue submitting loads of links to the disavowal tool and thus doing the job of the web spam team for them. In addition, negative SEO could be possible though at the moment it is not known just how many reports it might take for Google to blacklist certain sites. I also agree with the fact that Pandora's box may have been opened... and while I obviously disagree about using the tool, submitting good links to the tool mixed in with bad ones may be a way to fuck up the system, it's an interesting idea. But in that case, you would be devaluing the good links to that person's site... how exactly are you doing this?

We can't predict anything from google side. We have to wait an watch. Some may upload .edu or .gov domains in disavow tool, if your assumption is correct, then google blacklist most of the university or governmental domains. is like that?

"Bad links" are like cancer. Either you live with them as long as you can and hope for the best, or cut them out and even a bit of the surrounding tissue.

If you're going to submit removal requests, accept the fact that there's:
1) Some obvious high quality links (thanks Ahref for identifying them) - we'll keep those
2) Some obvious poor links (PR stripped and/or de-indexed or obvious BS like male member enlargement and foreign language posts) - we'll submit those for removal
3) Grey area

Rather than going through that grey area with a fine tooth comb, grab the ones you think are crap, the ones that might be crap AND those you think are okay, but really don't have any value anyway - we'll submit those too.

This gets us our cleanup done, gets Google some false positives, gives the website owner a squeaky profile and then lets us get on with the high authority link building.

For those who want to use mass tools and not have website owners worrying about the backlink profile, just mass blast those links on tier 2. They'll never see it in their profile, which stays squeaky clean.

In fact, I've started to (and bet many more will be jumping on this too) begun focusing on building a handful of high authority tier 1 and then going much, much heavier on tier 2. Strengthening the links, instead of building new ones, is the way to preserve your squeaky backlink profile while at the same time boosting your rankings. Remember we don't NEED more tier 1 links, we just need improved rankings!