Negative SEO and the potential impact of bad backlinks have been growing concerns for many webmasters since Google’s Penguin update earlier this year, which sought to penalize low-quality backlinks. Indeed, because site owners often have no control over the external websites that link back to them, a competitor could intentionally point thousands of spam links at them to encourage penalties — a practice that’s known as “negative SEO.”
But even sites that are not the target of these attacks can be penalized if the backlink building tactics they’ve used in the past no longer pass muster with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and they’re unable to work with referring webmasters to have the low value links changed or taken down.
Fortunately, Google has finally offered webmasters an opportunity for redress through the new Disavow Links tool. Essentially, Disavow Links enables webmasters to submit files through the Google Webmaster Tools interface listing any links Google should devalue when determining the overall authority of the links pointing back at a website. If, for example, your website had five good links and one bad link pointing at it, a Disavow Links request would let Google know that you’d like only the five good links taken into consideration when your backlink profile is evaluated.
This sounds like a potentially great solution for webmasters who have struggled to remove low-quality backlinks from their profiles, whether in response to a “bad links” notice from Google, a rankings drop following an algorithm change or a suspected attack. But there are a few things to keep in mind regarding this new feature.
Source:[entrepreneur.com]
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