Google Announces New Tool in Your SEO Arsenal
One of the primary factors Google takes into account when determining your website’s rankings are the quality and relevant websites that link to you. As an example, if you are a certified Whirlpool technician and the Whirlpool.com website lists your business and links to your website, that is a quality, relevant link coming to your website.
With the introduction of their Panda and Penguin algorithm updates over the past year and a half, many in the SEO industry have speculated that you could damage your competitor’s rankings by building spammy links to their website. This is called “negative SEO”. It’s also possible a website owner hired an SEO company who was not following best practices, and built spammy links to their website and damaged their rankings. Because of the importance of links it would be nice to have a way to tell the search engines to ignore those bad links coming into your website. When Bing launched their Disavow Links tool back in June the industry called upon Google to do the same.
Yesterday Google announced the launch of their own version of the Disavow Links tool. Matt Cutts encourages website owners to use the tool judiciously, and only after you’ve tried to have the bad links removed from the offending websites and blogs.
Here is Matt Cutts’ video on the subject: