Disavowing Harmful Website Links: How to Identify Them Ep. 603

Howdy! Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Seekers of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. Today I have a special episode for you today. It's disavowing harmful website links and how to identify them. I'm going to go into why this is important, how to go about doing it, and some general thought processes around it. I had a series, a two-part series, on recently link building and there was a lot of interest in that. I want to quickly read two of the reviews that I got related to that. One person said, well, what is a PBB or PDB? Can you explain that? I understand it's expensive and powerful. That was by Chris Bates. Really my response to him was, I think you're asking about PBNs. They're private blog networks, clusters of sites, often controlled by one entity that aim beefing up a website's ranking by cooking up artificial links. It's risky business. They're frowned upon by Google. It's seen as black hat SEO. If search engines sniff this out, your site could take a hit. Beware if someone offers to sell you a PBN for cash, so that would be like a public blog network. That goes back into linking to or from sketchy, bad neighborhoods. We've been talking about bad neighborhoods for years in SEO and it could damage your site. I thought that that prompted a discussion around maybe negative SEO, the disavow tool, how to look at not just acquiring backlinks, but what to do if your website gets backlinks you don't really want. There's a lot that goes into how to properly, if you're getting a link, it should be no follow. There's things around, if you are building websites, I know there's a lot of web developers that listen to this, as far as putting it in the footer. You want to make sure that that's no follow. You don't want it on 500 different websites and the footer linking back to you. Google does not like that. It makes your backlink profile look kind of suspicious.

I just thought talking about the disavow tool is something that I know a lot of people don't go over a lot, so I wanted to go into that. If I remember, I'll read this other review later because it's kind of funny. Some of the resources I'm going to be using for this podcast, oh, I also wanted to let you know, I have like 20 interviews lined up. Hopefully you liked the last interview about memes. I'm going to be doing kind of a series and I'll put those over on a list so you can listen to them kind of maybe in order, like a playlist for content marketing. I'm really digging into doing a lot more content marketing and thought leadership these days, but this is about linking, but I do have a lot of great people coming on. I'm going to probably start interviewing people rather consistently, so if you'd like to be on the podcast or you have a question, please send it in. I saw this really cool tool where you could leave your question in voice and then on the podcast, which we do video or audio, we can play your question and you can say who you are and get a shout out that way and then I can answer it live. So I'm going to try to start incorporating some of this technology into the podcast, but also going to start interviewing some really interesting people to bring kind of new concepts into this and make it more industry interesting. I'm going to start to put some of my spin on this and then these kind of solo podcasts is going to be like a special treat. So I have been talking to a couple of people about co-hosts as well. I've been doing a lot of active work on the oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. If you want to go check that out, we have those going out consistently. But this podcast, I'm still trying to get my legs up under me since Chris left. So I

appreciate your understanding and support. All right, let's jump into this. So I'm using the Google search console and that's actually where you disavow your links. You want to make sure you have a search console set up. There's been a couple of clients that we had brought on that hadn't set this up properly, but this is a great source of information. I think I did a previous podcast talking about how to use a search console. It might've been incorporated into something else, but to do the disavow, you would just go to search.google.com forward slash search console slash disavow-links. So search-console forward slash disavow-links should get you there. And then if you have your search console connected to your Google login, you should see all the properties that you manage and your site should be in there. You can grab your site and then you upload just like a notes, like a, what is it called? There's a certain requirement of the type of file it is. You can't upload like a word document or whatever. And you can use tools like SEMrush, SERanking, Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz to figure out what links are coming to your site. Also in search console, you can see a list of all the links that are coming to your site. There's multiple ways to get to this tool. You can also get to it directly if you're logging in to search console over on the left hand side. But you should be, I don't know, once a month, once a quarter looking to see who is, you know, what links you're generating to your site. There's a way to set it up in WordPress to see what blogs and what pages you're generating links. A lot of these links are somewhat spammy links in the beginning and over time too many spammy links or even unnatural looking links. Or if you've done any kind of like link schemes, you really should look at removing those. Those do hurt your site. So I'm going to go into more detail there. But you

just, you know, you would upload this. What is, what is the tool that uses like notes, right? Notepad, right? A notepad document. And if, and I'll put this link in the, the show notes, right? And so it goes through the details. It must be a UFT eight or seven bit ASCCI text file, a UFT UTF dash eight text file is notepad dot TXT maximum length, 2048 characters, maximum size, but basically put a hashtag in front of whatever it is you're saying. You can disavow the whole website like URL or domain. So you could do a hashtag X number of domains to disavow, disavow dash, and then put the name of the website. Don't put the forward slash at the back of the.com or.net or whatever it is. And don't put the www dot, just put the name of the URL dot whatever the extension is. And then you can also do specific pages. So this is not a surefire way to have negative effects from bad websites. Sometimes like negative SEOs. I did have this client one time that had, we actually, it was the enterprise client. We pulled them up and they had porn links to their site. And so I was like, yeah, we probably should, should go ahead and get rid of this. There's been recent rules and, and things that have been pushed out recently. I know the most recent is the helpful content update, which is going after kind of AI content. That's going to have to be a separate podcast, but, but specifically people are worried about, you know, low quality links, spammy links or toxic links hurting them. And there's kind of different variations of tiers. One is a manual review, tear down from that as an algorithmic penalty. And that means you're kind of outside the standard deviation of what's in the norm and you're trying to manipulate the search engines so much that you want to probably roll some of whatever those efforts are back if you've overdone it and SEOs are known to overdo it.

And so you're trying to well create and generate and develop maybe linkable content that high quality sites in your industry or niche and your geographic location want to link to you. I would tell you a lot of link building efforts are just a waste of time, waste of money. You know, if you're an SEO or a web developer out there and you don't want to give those links to your client because you don't think they're high value links, they're probably not high value. So you probably shouldn't be doing it. Search engines are getting a lot better. I would also tell you don't worry so much about negative SEO. If you haven't been involved in like internet spam or link building for low quality links and it's like a burst of negative low quality links, Google can typically just see that pretty easily and discard it. But if you've been building low quality links over a period of time, that's when it can affect you. And so there are some really good webmaster hangouts where they talk about some of this stuff. I do have an article that I'm going to go through here in a second and I'm going to try to also be respectful of time. We're about 10 minutes in. Hopefully you've already gotten some value. So disavows are helpful just like no falls are helpful. But again, Google looks at everything. It's better to try to get people to actually remove that link versus disavow it. That's the best thing possible. Actually was doing a review of some of our links and we also have a hosting company as well. So we do hosting, web maintenance, that sort of thing. I think it's really important if you are doing SEO to not spend too much time on customer support with website hosting companies. So that's why we developed our own. But anyways, we had some sites that we were putting in the footer. Hey, we built this site and that is meant to get referral traffic because people like the branding of

the site or they're an industry leader and we want them to know that we're associated with it and we're looking for referral traffic. And you want to do that as a no fall link. That is okay. Trying to do it to generate link juice and also use like compound words of high target words you're trying to rank for if you're trying to manipulate the search engines and it's do fall link, it is not viewed favorably. But to each his own and things work, I'm a big fan of trying to follow the Google guidelines as best as possible. I think putting the effort into that is where you should spend your time and you don't have to look over your corner and worry about these recent updates. So got a call from somebody who lost 30% of their traffic from this last round of updates. Hey, if you're following the Google ones, you don't have to worry about this stuff. All right. So again, that's the support Google link webmasters. Also the search.google and then the search console. This file link, I'll put that in there too. That's kind of how you do it and upload that list. And if you already have a list uploaded, it's great to download that list, add to it and re upload it. And then, you know, request getting re indexed and Google will get around to it. Database turns over about every two months. So could take some time. You know, on page links and what you can control like with this vow and stuff. These are things you can control. You can't control a great site link into you, but you can build really high quality content that people might link to you. So that could really help too. So, okay. You know, how to identify and disavow low quality links and why is it important? Well, you know, if you have a lot of low quality and spammy links, they can negatively impact your site. I would tell you there's so much link spam out there. You're

kind of sifting through what to find. And, you know, there's a couple of sites out there. There's these like crazy directories that somehow they'll get you listed and then they'll produce like 60,000 links or something. I don't know what exactly the role is behind some of these tools or why that may be helpful in the past. But when you get 60,000 links from like some, you know, directory tub or some, you know, listing like that, it starts to really affect your SEO. And certainly if it's for high value words or words you don't want to rank for, it can affect you. Again, you're outside that kind of standard deviation. So I have this great article from SEMrush. SEMrush does a lot of great content marketing. And, you know, I think they're a great tool to use if you can't afford it. I think there's a lot of other great value tools as well. And I did do a podcast on different keyword research tools a while back because Ahrefs changed some things. All these guys have sponsored my podcast. I'm not currently taking sponsorships from any of these type of companies right now. So what I'm telling you is just what I think. All right. You know, for educational purposes only, right? All right. So when it comes to building a strong website, backlinks are in general the most important factor. I think that Core Web Vitals is pretty important, but this is, well, the algorithm was built on backlinks and those signals are certainly important. Forget the discussion over the ethics of corner links. We're not going to talk about that right now. But should the average SEO be concerned with disavowing links? I think if you're not disavowing links or if you don't understand how it is or you're not looking at it, it's just like you have a blindfold in a certain area. So you can't see everything that's going on and you really want to look at these websites if you're a webmaster or you're doing SEO from a 360 view.

You know, so unlike some other topics, Google has been quite forthcoming in their backlink disavow views and its place in your search engine optimization toolbox. Why disavowing links? The only Google-prescribed use of link disavows is to address penalties levied against your web property. If you receive a message from Google of unnatural links, you are being penalized whether you know it explicitly or not. Part of your webmaster is addressing these penalties. So that is in Search Console 2 over on the left side. I think it's in like legacy or history tools. You can find it in there. But if you're practicing white hat SEO, you shouldn't be worried about, again, if someone's attacking you with negative SEO and you're not doing anything negative, Google can see that. And if it hasn't been going on for a long period of time, you're pretty in good shape. Remember, anything you do to these sites on the domain, Google will know wherever. Things don't change. That's kind of like the blockchain. I know I've talked about that in the past. Algorithms never forget. All right. So it's telling you Google Analytics, Search Console, and SEMrush's backlink tool. What is a bad backlink? The vast majority of links are good links. They represent the ideal internet that Google is striving for. One, where good content is referenced frequently and freely. Most of them won't move the needle for your site. And they are slow to building your reputation as trust and authoritative resources. Bad links on the internet are almost always inorganic, though they are exceptions. Two of the biggest offenders of links that can be purchased in mass from shady SEO sites intentionally backlinking schemes utilizing private blog networks. And here is Google's guidelines on linking schemes. I guess I'll add that, which I won't read it, but I'll add it to the show notes here. PBNs. And that was what someone had asked about. Look, a private blog network is a network of sites that are all associated with each other, all linking to each other, and then

pointing to a particular site to juice it. Or it's like a link wheel where they're juicing each other. Google can pick up on this stuff pretty easily. SEMrush can even pick up on this stuff pretty easily. It's not hard to do. Also, if you think about it, if someone's selling you a link on their PBN, how many more times have they sold it to? And what is it linking to? And it's going to be all over the place. And if you have random links going all over the place that are not in a specific niche, they're not very valuable. They're just general hub sites. So I'm not a huge fan of that. I would even call that more of a public blog network. Now, there are media sites or news sites that are all in association, but they're all public. Now you're in the gray area. It depends how they're structured and if they're doing no follows. There's some things associated with it. But typically, a good PBN, someone builds it. There's different IP addresses. There's different domains. It might be in a niche or something like that. And then they link sculpt it a lot to link to each other in a way. And they typically don't share it. And so I can tell you, I know a number of SEOs that have PBNs. I can tell you, I know a PBN network and provider works with a major car brand. And I'm not going to give away the major car brand, but it's a very, very major car brand. He's the main provider of SEO for that car brand. And his whole business is PBNs basically and some SEO. Maybe that's his secret sauce. But what I would tell you is I have heard stories of big brands. I think it was like Dillard's and other brands that have gone down with these linking schemes. This is not a good strategy. I would tell you if you're a brand out there, your SEO provider is your representative online and you should have a

basic knowledge of what it is they're doing to at least be better to evaluate what they're doing. So it's not as black box, but also being able to understand is this representative acting in a way that's in accordance that you want it to act. And if you want to follow the search engine guidelines or Google guidelines or something like that, are they doing it or not? I think these things are really, really important. And I am a huge proponent of people understanding how these search engines work, how to place in the SERPs and understand what people are doing. I think it should be an internal culture of people understanding SEO versus one individual doing a bunch of SEO stuff. And long are the days of just keyword stuffing words. Okay. Things have gotten a lot more advanced. And even these PBNs, again, you use machine learning. You can pick up on a lot of this stuff pretty accurately. Now, if you have two sites, okay, and this is coming from like the webmaster podcasts or questions. If you have two sites, it is okay to link those together. And it's okay for Google to understand that those two sites are associated. That is okay. Whatever you want to do generally to grow your business and get referral traffic and build your visibility in a way that's targeting customers and how the users are searched for, I think it's totally fine. Now, if you have like, oh, I have 20 sites that I'm all linking together in the footer or something like that, or first page, right? And first page links typically have more juice. But why would a bunch of websites link to a bunch of other websites on the first page, right? So not organic looking, right? So it is also possible organically to receive a link from one of these ultra spammy sites that are just lists of products and links with no real content. And that has absolutely happened. It's happened to a number of our clients. It's happened to us. Links

probably aren't placed by a human. And it's certainly not benefiting your site. Yeah, you can remove those. Now, I think that the algorithm, you want to measure some of these links and understand that, okay, the made up numbers of trust flow and domain authority that these links have by these different platforms. And you got to be careful. You don't know what's pushing what, but typically, I just go look at the link and I'll click on it and you can tell if it's either high quality or not, right? If it's a real site or not. There's other things you can do to look into it a little bit more. A lot of this done is through machine learning, but you should be able to eyeball it. All right. Negative SEO attack. Bad links are subject to particular unscrupulous strategy called negative SEO. At this point, anyone with the barest knowledge of SEO knows not to purchase hundreds of thousands of links as it is certainly linked to a penalty on your site. Instead, you can attack your competitors by purchasing all those backlinks and pointing them to the rival domain, ensuring a penalty. The only recourse for these victims of negative SEO is to disavow all the links that target their site because they can't go ask for them to ruin it. They also don't know who bought it. But if all these come at once, Google can see that pretty easily. I wouldn't worry about this so much. Now, I do have two clients that are in very competitive spaces and there is a lot of negative SEO going on. There's a lot of people that are working on some of these sites that it's very high dollar and there's a lot at stake and people are rather unscrupulous and it does happen. And the best you can do is negative out those sites. And especially if you're getting attacked and you're not negative out of those sites and it happens over a period of time, you could receive a penalty that way. So you

want to know who's linking to you. You kind of want to know. Again, 360, everything's going on the site. When to disavow links. If it isn't already clear, disavowing backlinks isn't something you do on a whim. It's a very serious action that can have a significant impact on your rankings. I have seen people disavow too many links or the wrong links and sites tank from this as well, just like 301 redirects, not doing 301 redirects right. And you have links coming to your site and you're changing the overall structure of the site in the URL without doing 301 redirects. Now there's a lot of tools like RankMath, which will auto do the redirects for you. But that is something also detrimental. Check the quality, Google quality guidelines for more exhaustive lists. Again, I'm going to link to that in the show notes. I want to try to give you everything from this podcast to know what you're doing. Note that links from low quality or low domain site is not a bad link. It's probably won't contribute much individually. But every link is a vote of confidence for your site. And Google takes that into account. What happens when you disavow a backlink? So what exactly does a link disavow do? It is a request from Google to ignore those links to your domain. If the disavow is successful, it won't be counted for you or against you. Google is not obligated to honor your request for the disavow, specifically in their documentation submitting that. It's a suggestion, right? Same thing with nofollow. However, the same material they describe is a tool to fix bad linking practices and undo work of a poor SEO you hired. So you can expect them to honor link disavows instead of being punitive, right? So you're trying to do the right thing. It is possible to undo a link disavow. Yes, you just go delete the list and re upload it. Now changing links, changing anchor text, doing any of this stuff where you're manipulating stuff after it's been

done. Google looks at the link with less trust more cautiously, thinks maybe you could be doing something to manipulate search rankings or anchor text or stuff like that. So just, again, err on the side of cost and make sure it's something you want to do. And treat it as kind of something in concrete that you're doing. Don't just do it on a whim. I really think through it, get approvals by any stakeholders. But it is a good practice. How to disavow links, right? So it kind of lays out what I shared with you previously. It talks about the tool. Define the links you want to disavow, create your disavow link, separate the URL by domain, upload the disavow list with doc.txt file. So that disavow links quickly and easily. And then SEMrush goes into their backlink tool of what to use. All these are a little bit different, but also all of them are using a little bit different of algorithm, their own kind of special sauce to create this. Evaluate the links for yourself. See if it's valuable. See if it's something that would be helpful. You are going to generate links organically. And that is a good thing. That is what you're trying to do. And not all links are going to be this super high quality. You're going to get a good mix of all of them. Typically, you're going to get mostly low quality links and then a little bit better, a little bit better. It's going to be like a layered cake. So you don't want to disavow all your low quality links and only have high quality links because that makes your link profile look a little bit manipulated as well, right? Hopefully this podcast was helpful to give you a big overview. I'd ask, please leave a comment. Please leave a review. We do have one-on-one consulting that is available. It's under Learn More on the EWRdigital.com website. I do a lot of those. We used to call them profit plans. You can find that also on bestseopodcast.com.

I would also tell you we are starting a small business kind of mastermind group. I've been doing some agency consulting as well. That's been going really well. And we're about to launch a mastermind group for specifically the oil and gas industry. And I want to offer that also to small business owners. I have a lot of great books out there to help small business owners grow. We've been adding new team members, new clients. We're doing some really cool generative AI stuff with videos, with images. We're able to make some really cool lead magnets. We've been doing a lot of thought leadership, podcasting services, content marketing. That's really been my focus right now is really develop our content marketing arm to help more B2B enterprise level brands accelerate their growth while incorporating the strategic view of SEO. I think SEO is like a mirror. It's super important of what you're looking at. We've landed some other B2C national companies recently as well. And we're adding new team members. So everything is super exciting. We would love to help you out. Love to get to know you. Love to talk to you. So please connect with us if you found value. Please show it in some way. I try to get these podcasts out as much as I can. Like I said, I got a lot of great interviews coming up where I'll try to guide the conversation towards things that I think would be useful to everyone, to you. And until next time, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful, strongest tool on the planet, which is the internet, reach out to us for more revenue in your business. Click awrdigital.com. Click on that free consultation button. And we'd love to connect you with one of our representatives. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.