In today’s economic downturn and financial volatility, a business must not only focus on bolstering its existing client and partner relationships but also on establishing and developing new connections, both vertically and horizontally.
Search Engine Optimisation (‘SEO’) has, through its constant evolution, aided entrepreneurs in successfully promoting their products and services on a local and international level. Recently, however, many businesses have been submerged, struggling to deal with the torrents of competition and negative SEO.
When Google introduced the Penguin update in April last year many websites were penalised for non- compliance with its rules and were, consequently, downgraded in the Search Engine Result Page('SERP') rankings. Put simply, those websites were bumped down in the order they appeared in a Google search.
The update also gave birth to ‘negative SEO’- competitors spamming your website with broken backlinks. Under the Penguin algorithm, having those links on your website constituted stark violations of Google’s T&Cs which meant that your website was being continuously downgraded.
To tackle this, Google have recently come with a new tool which allows you to disavow (remove and block) certain links and even domains.
The tool has not been as popular in the USA as Google initially hoped; in fact, a mere 41% of those asked in a recent poll said that they would use it.
Although the new ‘Disavow Link’ tool might be quite beneficial to regaining your website’s status in the SERP rankings if used properly, it might be equally detrimental to your SEO.
To begin with, it must be noted that identifying diseased links is incredibly time- consuming and needs to be done via a program that you need to pay for (such as Ahrefs, for instance).
Also, removing a certain broken backlink does automatically update the status of your website as ‘Google reserves the right to trust our own judgement’. This potentially means that a removal might itself take quite some time and might not affect your website’s overall rankings.
Last but not least, as advised by Google, you should be very careful when you disavow links and domains, especially when you are not 100% certain that those are being used as a form of negative SEO. Disavowing incorrect links is currently very difficult to reverse and can, therefore, be rather counter- productive.
In the light of the above, it would seem that, in its present state, the Disavow Link Tool might do a considerable amount of damage to a website’s SEO if not used with great care.
Judging by its reception in the USA, UK might not yet be quite ready to accommodate the tool’s everyday use. We will have to come up with another way to fight off negative SEO; at least for the time being.
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