Another SEO professional was curious about their submission of a disavow file.
A few days after they submitted the disavow file, in which they removed hundreds of spammy links, they experienced a collapse of their website in terms of search results performance.
They were under the impression that there was some sort of a soft penalty in place, simply because they used the disavow tool.
They were also concerned about how long it would take for their site to return to normal traffic and ranking.
Their main question was whether or not there was a permanent black mark against the site simply because they used the disavow tool.
John answered that there is no black flag assigned by Google because you reported that you were doing bad linking activity in the past.
From their perspective, the disavow tool is simply a technical tool that one can use if there are any bad links you find that are pointing at your site, which you may not want Google to consider when evaluating your site for ranking.
It doesn’t mean that Google thinks you’re the one who created those links. It’s all up to you regarding the disavow tool.
This tool just helps you manage the external associations that Google understands about your website in search.
John also explained that in the majority of cases, if you’re seeing things like random links coming to your site, it’s not necessary to use the disavow tool.
However, if you are seeing something where you might be concerned about linking activity that would mislead a manual reviewer to assume that you are responsible for these bad links, it could make sense to use the disavow tool.
It doesn’t mean you actually did it and it’s not a sign that you’re admitting fault for link games. From their point of view, it’s purely a technical tool.
Additionally, John explained that regarding most manual actions, if they’re resolved and fully cleaned up, Google does not hold a grudge against your website.
They do not have a memory in their systems that treat a site negatively because of a few negative actions in the past.
Their stance is, if you’ve cleaned up the issue with the disavow tool, you have cleaned up the issue and that’s it.
With some issues, however, it does take some time for things to really be analyzed and show up in the search results and for these results to be more stable.
This is because they have to reprocess everything that is, or has ever been, associated with the website.
This takes quite a bit of time.
Don’t assume that just because you submitted a disavow file, and your site crashed in the search results a few days later that these are related.
It’s more likely that something else affected the site more so than the disavow tool ever would.
This happens at approximately the 17:58 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (17:58)
Let’s see – question on the disavow tool: does using the disavow tool raise a flag in the algorithm and trigger a soft penalty on a website for possibly engaging in link building in the past? We’ve used this tool to remove hundreds of spammy links and our site collapsed a few days later. Should we remove the disavow file? And how long will it take for a site to return to normal traffic and ranking? Or is there a permanent black mark against this website for using the disavow tool?
John (18:28)
Good question. No, there is not any kind of penalty, or black flag, or mark, or anything associated with using the disavow tool. From our point of view, this is purely a technical tool that you can use if you have any links that are pointing at your website that you don’t want to be taken into account by Google systems. And it’s like, it doesn’t mean that you created those links, it can be something that you found where you’re really worried that Google might get the wrong picture for your website. It’s essentially up to you.
It’s essentially a technical tool that helps you to kind of manage the external associations with your website with regards to Google Search. In most cases, if you’re just seeing random links coming to your website, you don’t need to use a disavow tool. But if you see something where you’re saying, “Well, I definitely didn’t do this.” And if someone from Google manually were to look at my website, they might assume that I did this, then it might make sense to use a disavow tool.
But that’s from that point of view, it doesn’t mean that you did it or it’s not a kind of a sign that Oh, you’re admitting that you were doing link games in the past. From our point of view, it’s really purely a technical tool. And also in general with regards to pretty much I’d say like most manual actions in general, if the manual action is resolved, and if the issue is cleaned up, then we’re treating your site as we would treat any other website.
It’s not that we have a memory in our systems that would say, “Oh, well, this website had a manual action in the past, therefore, it might be shady in the future as well.” From our point of view, if you’ve cleaned up an issue, then you’ve cleaned up that issue. With some kinds of issues, it does take a little bit longer for things to settle down just because we have to reprocess everything associated with the website.
And that takes a bit of time. But it’s not the case that there’s any kind of a grudge or algorithms that’s holding back a site. With regards to this particular case, where you’re saying you submitted a disavow file, and then the ranking dropped or the visibility dropped, especially a few days later, I would assume that that is not related.
So in particular, with a disavow file, what happens is we take that file into account when we reprocess the links, kind of pointing to your website. And this is a process that happens incrementally over a period of time, where I would expect it would have an effect over the course of, I don’t know, maybe three, four, five, six months, kind of step by step going in that direction.
So if you’re saying that you saw an effect within a couple of days, and it was a really strong effect, then I would assume that this effect is completely unrelated to the disavow file. That said, it sounds like you, you still haven’t figured out what might be causing this. So that might be worthwhile to maybe jump in on another of these hangouts at some point, and maybe we can go through some of the different options that might be kind of affecting your website there. It’s really hard to say, because it’s definitely not based on the disavow file. But what else could it be? There are so many different options.
