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Should I Pay For Link Removal? Nah … Disavow Them

Services: Law Firm Website Design . SEO . Internet Marketing . Law Firm Marketing Guide . Content Marketing . PPC

Your website’s monthly maintenance is probably expensive enough. Lucky for you, Google doesn’t want you to spend any more green making bad links disappear.

If you are cleaning the links to your website to improve your search engine rankings you should not pay for removal (Google agrees with me). While it is technically and theoretically acceptable for a website to ask to be paid to remove a link (as any company charges for their time), it isn’t necessary.

About Disavowing

If you have made an honest effort to clean up the spammy and low-quality links on your website, and are no longer making progress getting the remaining links removed, you can disavow them. By disavowing a link you are telling Google that, as the publisher of your website, you do not want this link to count when ranking your page or website.

This tool is about a year old, officially launching in October of 2012, and has proven to be a major benefit for publishers. An advanced tool, it should be considered a “last resort” option. Google wants to see that you made an honest effort to have the link removed in a more traditional way before disavowing.

Why Do I Have Bad Links?

You can acquire negative backlinks a variety of ways, including:

  • You’ve done bad SEO in the past or hired a team that did bad SEO
  • A strange bot is pointing a bunch of bad links to your website
  • Using your email automatic response (allowing a spam company to receive your email)

Bad back links effect search engine optimization result rankings, which is why removing them should be a priority for the success of your SEO campaign. In doing so, it is possible to see your results rocket to the top. Think of your website as a boat and all of your bad links as anchors. The bad links (anchors) weigh you down and pull you to the bottom of the search engine rankings (the ocean).

As you clean those bad links up and are freed of those anchors, you begin to rise to the top. Theoretically, if negative back links are the only factor affecting your SEO, when they are cleared up you will see significant results in your rankings.

Google’s Reaction

When you disavow links you are telling Google that you want to disassociate yourself from the websites in question. Keep in mind that this disassociation is not instant. It may take anywhere from two weeks to two or three months for Google to re-index your website—and for you to see results.

Even though that timeline is less than satisfactory for most clients, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Spam Team says you should not worry after disavowing links, Google will handle the rest. So, consider it a job well done.

PaperStreet Can Help

Keeping negative SEO at bay can be difficult—pat yourself on the back for cleaning up the links to your website. As always, the PaperStreet team is here to help and answer any questions you may have about the process.

Happy bad link hunting.

 


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