Google announced the much anticipated "Disavow Links" tool in Google Webmaster Tools. I was wrong in assuming it will be known something different than Bing in this thread - New Bing "Disavow Links" tools
I tried it out on Saturday, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for Google to action the list of links I sent them. Most of the links I provided do not actually exist any more but are still showing in webmaster tools.
Yes it will be interesting to see the action on reporting from Google and how they react on search results.
The advice given by Google with the tool says that most people will not need it, and it is apparently provided mainly for those who have received unnatural links warnings and/or penalties. This seems surprising to me as many of those (like myself) who have been waiting for this tool have not received an unnatural links email but were hit by Penguin.
That is normal because Google removing content that is not good enough for their SERPs would mean that some of your links are also gone and so you should be affected by penguin.
ok I understand that because of Penguin some or the links which were counting before are not counting now. But I am more concerned with the links that still show in GWT that could potentially be harmful. To give examples, I have links showing from: sports-betting-and-gambling(dot)com security--guards(dot)com rehabilitationforalcohol(dot)com go2.infoslobber(dot)com If you visit those sites you will see that they are poor quality and not related to my industry. The links are no longer there, but according to GWT they are. Perhaps Google has discounted them anyway but I have no way of knowing whether they have or have not but they are not sites that I wish to be associated with and they could be considered to be "bad neighbourhoods".
If the links are not on the pages then you need not worry about it because it may be that Google did not update the cache for those pages.
Yes I understand that, but that is the whole point of using this tool to let Google know. As they have not re-crawled those sites, they do not yet know that the links are no longer there, so if they do consider them to be bad links they will still count against me until they do know.
Google Search Quality engineer, Uli Lutz gave three bits of advice in regards to the disavow link tool: (1) Focus on the links reported in the Google Webmaster Tools (2) Do not worry about damaging other people, he said "that does not happen." (3) Be aware of the site-wide disavow possibility, it will make your life easier. So don't be afraid to use the site-wide feature.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to disavow any links that are not reported in GWT anyway. If Google haven't found them, what would be the point in asking Google to disavow them?
