Disavow Links: Ways to control Links to your Website

The disavow link feature is a relief for many website owners who are victims of unnecessary external links to their website.  It puts website owners in control of both internal and external links to their websites.

Prior to the advent of the disavow links feature website owners were at the mercy of spammy website owners.  They could only request for any undesirable external links to their website to be removed.  They cannot do anything else if this request is ignored by the owners of the culprit websites.
With the introduction of the disavow links feature website owners decide who can or cannot link to their websites.  Thus, the ball is no longer in the courts of dodgy website owners but in the hands of real website owners.
The disavow links feature allows website owners to inform search engines about the external links they approve and those they disapprove for their websites.  This prevents a website from being penalised as a result of unsolicited external links.
For them to benefit from it however website owners must know how to use the disavow links feature.  I will explain briefly how to use the disavow links feature for website owners unfamiliar with it. 
First you must register for webmaster tools to use the disavow links feature.  You can register for the Google webmaster tools and the Bing Webmaster tools.
Then add your business to the Google Website tools using Add a Property option and to Bing webmaster tools Using Add a Site option. These options can be found at the top right corner of the respective webmaster tools after you have logged in to your webmaster account.   
Information about all links to this website can be found by clicking on the Search Traffic and then Links to Your Site within the Google webmaster tools and on the Dashboad page within the Bing webmaster tools after it has been added to the Webmaster tools. 
You can download the external links to your website within the Google webmaster tools in order to determine the undesirable links to disavow by clicking on Links to Your site, then More and Download Latest Links options.   Save the file as txt.  A sample file to upload for disavowing after downloading the latest links can be found below.
# Site owner copied my entire website
domain:ginbak​.co​m
Replace ginbak.com with the site domain to disavow.
The process of disavowing links within the Bing webmaster tools is more straightforward.  Just log in to the Bing webmaster tools.  Select the site to disavow links.  On the top left hand side of the page click on Configure My Site, then Disavow links options.  Within the Disavow links page select the page or domain to disavow from the drop down menu or type in the name of the page or site if it is not listed here and then click disavow links.

In order to disavow links within the Google webmaster tools go to this link.  Select the site you want to disavow links from the dropdown menu on the Disavow links page and click the disavow links option.  On the next page that appears click the disavow links option and upload the file containing the links to disavow and complete the disavowing links process.  Sample txt can be found above.
A word of caution, before disavowing any link make sure you contact the culprit website owner requesting for the link removal.  Also consider whether your website may benefit in any way from the external link in future before disavowing it.  Else you will inadvertently disavow great  links that are potentially beneficial to your website.

 

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