How to Disavow Links

It’s also worth noting that not all links directed back to your site can be beneficial. Spam sites do link to external domains to get readers convinced that they’re authoritative, whereas, they aren’t. For instance, link farms are crucial part of the black hat SEO implementations spam sites leverage believing such that can be beneficial. However, it isn’t the case.

Spam links are detrimental to a blog’s search rankings, as these can hold your site to ransom in search engines, or perhaps get your site blackmailed in search results. If this happens, your site will experience a hard time getting ranked for low-competitive keywords, let alone high-volume ones.

Now, to disavow backlinks, you need to first run a complete link audit to find out which domains are linking to your site. There are a couple of tools you can utilize to make that simpler. For example, Moz features an Open Site Explorer tool to help list all of your site’s anchor texts, backlinks, and the spam scores for all of those websites with links back to your own site. You may then have your link portfolio downloaded to a spreadsheet.

Once that’s done, simply add a disavow column and filtrate them leaving out only the spam link domains. Add another column to tell search engines which domains you want to disavow. The domain in the other column should appear as:

“disavow:spamdomain.com”

Moz features a spam score indicator which symbolizes which links are spam or low-quality. Any spam score from 4 and below may be considered while a spam score of 7 and above must be disavowed.