Article by Pierre Zarokian, CEO of SubmitExpress.com
 Matt Cutts & Pierre Zarokian |
Last week I attended Pubcon Las Vegas 2012, one of the biggest webmaster trade shows of the year. I came back with thought-provoking and entertaining stories to share. One of these involved Google’s new link removal tool, Disavow Links.
Here’s what happened. The day before Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, delivered his keynote address at Pubcon, I ran into him in the hallway of the show. I brought up the difficulty of removing bad links pointing to our company’s clients — even after strenuous outreach, many website owners will not respond to requests to remove such links. I asked Matt Cutts what Google could do about the matter. Matt asked me if I thought a “link removal tool would be good,” and after I mentioned that Bing had had the tool for over six months, and that many in the SEO community were asking for it, Matt said that he would pass on my suggestion to his team. |
That was October 15th; on the 16th, Matt Cutts held a keynote speech at Pubcon, and Google officially released its Disavow Links Tool. It is especially welcomed by those adversely affected by Google’s Penguin Update. Still, Google is advising caution: if you disavow the wrong link, it will take weeks to “reavow” it. Google is also suggesting that you try contacting the owners of the links you want removed before turning to Disavow Links. Access the tool by going to http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 and check out Cutts’ video about it below.