3 Steps to Reduce Spam Score Using Google Disavow Tool and Increase Traffic

Disavow definition – disavow means deny (deny any responsibility) or reject. Google disavow allows website owners to disavow bad backlinks (gambling sites, fraud sites, hacking sites, phishing sites, etc), which are given to the website by someone intentionally or unintentionally. Good backlinks help in increasing website traffic, but bad links can cause problems. These bad links (spammy links) can decrease your website traffic and ruins your hard work. There are many tools to check backlinks. This is the complete guide to fix all these types of issues. Google Disavow Tool – Use it to Reduce Spam Score and remove all the spammy backlinks that are decreasing your website traffic. Use google disavow and increase your website traffic.

Disavow links tool will help you to protect your website from link penalties. This tool enables you to tell Google to ignore specific links and domains for ranking purposes.

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When to Use Google Disavow Tool?

Use google disavow when there is a big drop in your traffic. Your keywords ranking is dropped in Google and other search engine rankings due to the increased spam score of your website. You can check your website spam score using Moz.com, Semrush or Moz bar google extension.

If your website niche is in the English language and you are making backlinks in the Chinese language websites. It can also be a factor (not a major one but some Chinese backlinks are also good depending on DA and PA).

If your websites have many backlinks from a single domain that has a high spam score then it can be a negative SEO. Mostly done by someone (maybe competitors) to down your website ranking and traffic. In this type of case, Check that particular domain spam score, page authority and domain authority using Moz.

In case, it is showing a spam score of less than 5% then don’t disavow such domain. If it is showing more than 12% spam score and low DA, PA with many backlinks given to your site then surely disavow these type of domain and pages.

How to Identify Good and Bad Links?

You can check domain authority, page authority and spam score of the website. Website niche is also an important factor. Backlink to a similar niche will give a boost to search engine ranking positions.

Bad links – low-quality link, PBN, Paid links, backlinks in porn sites, Blackhat SEO.

Google Disavow Tool – Use it to remove the spammy backlinks

If you are looking to remove all the spammy backlinks that are decreasing your website traffic. You can do it easily using this tool provided by Google. I am sharing the complete Step by step guide for using the Google disavow tool correctly.

Step 1 – Check your spam score

The first thing that you need to do is to check your website spam score and backlinks to your site. For this, you can use any tool like Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, google search console, backlink checker, etc. I personally like Semrush and Moz tools.

moz link explorer

Open Moz website. Sign up for a free account. Sign up is required for checking backlinks of the website. Click on free SEO tools and then click on link explorer. Now, Enter website URL whose backlinks and spam score you want to check. I am entering my website URL.

Moz will show your website domain authority, linking domains (backlinks in different websites), ranking keywords.

backlink checker

When you scroll down you will see spam score breakdown. If your website Moz spam score is in 1-4% then it is good. If it is in 5-7% then it is ok (means at danger line), 8-15% spam score will affect your Google ranking positions of keywords and may decrease your site traffic. Above 15% will ruin your google ranking. But don’t worry I will tell you how to reduce your spam score in this post.

You can check your backlink report on this chart. It will show you the number of linking domains and their spam score.

spammy backlinks

When you scroll down you will see backlinks of the website. Moz free version will show you only 50 backlinks of your website but for checking all your website backlinks you have to buy Moz paid version. These are the backlinks of my website. You can see the spam score of websites 88%, 77% and many more. This type of spam score backlinks down your site rankings.

Now, I will tell you how you can tell Google to ignore these backlinks for ranking purpose.

bad links

Step 2 – Disavow backlinks 

  • Open your notepad and write down domain, links, URL of all the bad backlinks. Writing a domain name in the list will completely disavow that domain name from your backlinks. If many backlinks pointing to your website from a single website (bad links) then you can disavow the domain instead of disavowing links. If an only single bad link from a website given a backlink to your website then don’t disavow whole domain. You can disavow that particular link.
  • To disavow a URL or domain, You have to Specify only one URL or domain per line in your notepad.
  • Your file must be a text file (.txt format) encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.
  • If you want to add comments in your notepad file, you can do it using # mark. Start writing anything with # and this comment line will be ignored by Google.

Example to disavow a page. This is how I created my list to disavow bad pages. You have to make your list in this way.

bad links

Example to disavow a domain. This is how I created my list to disavow spam domain. You have to make your list in this way. To disavow a domain, You have to add prefix domain:

low quality domain

Step 3 – Upload Your List Using Google Disavow Tool

Now, my list is completed. I am ready to upload it on google disavow tool. For doing this, here are the steps

1. Sign in to your google account.

2. Open disavow tool link page. Click on Disavow links.

google disavow tool

3. Click on disavow links.

google disavow tool

4. Now, I am uploading my files in which I have written all the bad links and low-quality domain to disavow. You can upload your files (.txt) to google disavow tool. Click on choose file and then select the file and upload it. Click on submit button.

disavow tools link page

5. Now, I have submitted my file.

disavow tool

Useful tools

4 Useful tools that may help you. You can use these tools to explore more bad links and check your spam score.

Install Moz bar chrome extension

Moz bar is the best tool that I like for SEO purpose and for many more things. Moz bar will help you to find the spam score of websites and display spam score at the top. How to install this tool?

moz bar spam score checker

Steps

  1. Open google chrome.
  2. Click on three dots menu which you can see at the top right corner.
  3. Click on more tools and then on extensions.
  4. Open the chrome web store.
  5. Search for Moz bar and install it.

Features that I like

  • Check spam score of websites.
  • Check do follow and no follow links on the page.
  • You can see domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of websites.
  • Check Internal and external links
  • Page analysis
  • Page optimization

Is this extension free? Yes, this tool is free. If you want to use more features, then you can buy the premium version of this extension. I am using the free one. You can use it. For using this extension first, you have to sign up on the Moz website and then login with your username and password.

Moz website

Moz website is the best platform for checking the spam score of your website. If your spam score is below 6% then it is good for your website. There are many features that Moz offers related to SEO services. Moz will show your website 50 backlinks with the highest spam score.

If you want to see the complete list, You have to buy the paid version of Moz.

Semrush

You can check your website backlinks and toxic backlinks (In Semrush toxic means bad links that may harm your website ranking, In Moz, it is spam score).

google disavow tool

Ahrefs

Ahrefs will show your website 100 backlinks. You can check each website’s spam score using the Moz bar. If you find spam score more than 10% write the page URL in your notepad to disavow. There are many features in Ahrefs tool related to SEO.

Risks of Using Google Disavow Tool

If google disavow tool used incorrectly, then it may harm your website traffic and search engine ranking positions. So, before you disavow any backlink of your website, have deep research (like DA, PA, spam score, niche, and other related things) on that link. A link that may look bad link but may influence your site traffic.

Google itself shows you a warning before using the Google disavow tool. In short, This warning tells us to disavow only low-quality, artificial spammy backlinks. If this tool is not used in the correct way it may harm your website ranking and SEO.

Conclusion

Use the google disavow tool if your spam score has increased more than the normal (that is 5%). If your website traffic has decreased.

Your posts are unable to rank as before. It may be possible that your website has been penalized by the Google algorithm or by manually due to bad backlinks.

It can take 1 day to 1 month or more to disavow the URL page links and domains that you have submitted in a text (.txt) file.

To reduce your Moz spam score and improve Google rankings, You should make backlinks in high authority sites by writing high-quality guest posts, and publish at least 6-8 posts in a month.

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