Google Disavow Tool

When Google announced the launch of their Disavow tool,  there were many people that thought they were about to do “Google’s job”. Basically, the marketers would be sending information about poor links directly to Google. Initially, I did not agree with that sentiment. In fact I appreciated it. From the day of Matt Cutts’ announcement regarding Disavow till today, I have changed my tune and to some extent, I have really grown to like this tool.

Recently I took on a customer in which we disavowed around 85% of thier links. The owner is an amazingly great woman who is seeing her business get hurt because of her previous search engine optimization firm’s efforts. Her business was left by the firm in a poor situation. She has a real business that assisted individuals in finding solutions for the problems of her niche. This woman was performing content marketing as well as creating assets that can add value prior to her employment with the SEO firm. She did not show any discretion with aggressive tactics on her site but instead slammed on the gas while going all in with the spam. She was able to continue her business by hiring people who were not aware that the SEO firm of hers was preparing her for failure.

Initially, I became a big Disavow fan. But now as I am spending excessive amount of time personally assisting 2 clients with it, who are both negatively affected by the tool, I cannot help but wonder if this is really best utilization of my time for helping those customers who want to succeed online. I am hunting down the spammy link networks instead of investing that same amount of time figuring out how to create valuable links. I Disavowed around 800 domains and continue to get declined over and over again. I began viewing this as serious needle in the haystack. It just doesn’t work all that well. You can only wonder what it will be like for average small business owners?

After submitting some Disavow links and reaching  denials time after time, I realized that it was a total waste of time. I will be keeping an eye on this, though since you never know with Google. Someday, it may be a worth while tool to use. We’re investing time to try finding link networks as well as things that we are not aware about as we didn’t created those crappy links for beginning with, and our SEO team didn’t work on this as well as on brainstorming how we can create valuable content for adding value.