What is a Link Disavow and Why is It Important?

Links are an integral part of any digital marketing strategy; by growing your overall link profile you not only prove to Google that you are an authoritative vendor but you also greatly increase your chances of garnering additional traffic through third party sources. While you may be led to believe that more is always better when it comes to links, this isn’t actually the case and an association with harmful or spammy domains is just as likely to result in Google punishing your domain. When you find an abundance of these low-quality websites linking to your own, you may begin to consider strategies for removing that association – this is where a link disavow comes in.

The Weight of Poor-Quality Links

Since the majority of processes are run through its algorithm, Google can’t always tell whether a website is spammy or not. To compensate for the abundance of a real person actually looking through the site, the algorithm looks into the referring domains of the suspected website to see if it harbours links to locations already identified as being poor. This approach is very much reminiscent of – you’re friends with someone dodgy, therefore, you must also be dodgy – of course, this isn’t always the case and you may simply not have been able to, or not have known to, carry out a sitewide link disavow.