Google Changes SEO Again

Google Changes SEO Again – with Webmaster Tools Disavow Links

Back in April, Google released the “Penguin” update – one of the biggest changes in direction in the last decade.

What they did was to reverse the long standing saying in SEO that . . . “Content is King and

Backlinks are Queen”

Well, I think that CONTENT will remain KING for a long time to come yet.

But Google has overturned everything that we have come to hold sacred about backlinks in SEO.

Yes, Google changes SEO again.

For the first time ever,

Backlinks Can Kill Your Website

. . . and there is very little that you could do about it.

Once set up, links are very difficult to remove because:

you often do not control where the links are posted, and
you do not control how Google records those links

But thankfully, Google changes SEO again. This week, Google launched the much-needed . . .

“Dis-avow Links” tool in Google Webmaster Tools

This at last gives website owners and webmasters the ability to tell Google to ignore links, especially links that are of lower quality which would tend to lower your SEO page rank, with Webmaster Tools Disavow Links.

You can upload a list of URLs or domains, (see image), and Google undertakes that links from those sites will be excluded from the ranking algorithms – in most cases within a matter of weeks.

You can get all the info from the Google Blog page and find out how Google changes SEO again.

Of course, you do need to understand which links are going to help you and which links are going to harm you. And only Google really knows that for sure anyway !!

The (possible) Bad News

So while Webmaster Tools Disavow Links sounds like good news, there is also a possible down side to it.

Thousands of webmasters will be disavowing backlinks to their sites, and based on this, Google is likely to take this to mean that those sites are low quality, undesirable websites.

The flow-on effect of the new Webmaster Tools Disavow Links is unknown, but we can speculate that it will completely overturn the value and importance of such sites.

This applies to those sites that have made it too easy to get a link back to your site, e.g. some common “easy” sources of links have been:

Blog comments and Social Bookmarking Accounts
Article and Web Site Directories, (like Yellow Pages!)
Forums
Web 2.0 sites
Automated Blog Networks with no human-approval “citation” process

Of course, no-one really knows exactly what Google is up to, and especially in the early stages of a new release like this.

But it does go to show how complex is the subject of obtaining AND KEEPING good SEO rankings, and just how difficult this would be for the average business owner to do in addition to all the other tasks a business owner has.

Because Google changes SEO again and again and again, we really believe that SEO needs the attention of a professional SEO team to be completely effective.