In October, Google released the much anticipated Google Disavow Tool. The SEO community greeted this release with much enthusiasm and loads of people went so far as to presume this to be the holy grail in terms of recovering from Penguin penalties. Google and Matt Cutts did caution people on the use of the Disavow tool and mentioned that submitting links via the tool does not guarantee those links would be taken into consideration and also that the process would take quite a while.
Since one of my business websites was a victim of the Penguin penalty and got into trouble with Google in April/May 2012, I was excited too. I had spent a few months trying to get rid of all the spammy links that the SEO company we had hired had been building over the years and successfully managed to remove over 87% of the bad links. The rest of the toxic internal links could not be removed, even after repeated emails to the site owners. I had to undertake serious detective work to track down emails and phone numbers of some of these sites but to no avail.
So when the tool was released, I decided that I would go for one more round of emails/phones to the offending sites and then compile a final list of links that I could not get removed which would then be submitted to the Disavow Tool. With this in mind, I proceeded to sift through the list of toxic links, emailing and where possible trying to phone the site owners with a plea to remove our link from their sites.
After about 2 weeks, I exhausted the list and armed with a final list, I submitted it to the Disavow Tool. I waited for 2 more weeks and then submitted a re-inclusion request to Google outlining my previous actions and the fact that I had submitted to the Disavow Tool. I reiterated all the steps I took since April 2012 to fire the SEO company, clean up our website, build our brand, remove over 87% of spammy links and finally implementing “no link building” policies in the company.
I hoped that this was sufficient. I felt that I had done extremely well, working hard for over 8 months, to address the issues and had shown Google my intentions in terms of not only cleaning up the mess but also how I would approach SEO in the future. My site was one of the oldest in it’s niche and had tons of original and useful content. I even thought I knew what SEO mistakes to avoid! I thought the penalties would finally be lifted. This was November 2012.
It is now January 2013 and we still have not recovered. We got back an automated message from Google saying that our re-inclusion request was not considered because we still had “unnatural links”. I am not sure what else I could have done. If one can not remove links and after repeated attempts, submits the links to the Google Disavow Tool, it should work. Right? I mean, that is the theory behind the Tool. In fact, after November, for one of our primary keywords (which also is our brand keyword), we went DOWN from page 2 to page 78! It looked as if submitting to the Disavow tool actually got me penalized further!
I even left a comment on Matt Cutt’s blog where he wrote a post on the Disavow Tool but Matt did not even approve the comment (even though I did not link any website to my comment). Ironically, back in 2011, I even made a video on surviving a Google penalty!
UPDATE: 15th February 2013
I got an email from Google on 23rd January that they have considered my re-inclusion request and the links in the GDT would not be counted etc. But right after that, for the main keyword we went from page 34 to NOWHERE to be found!
Have any of your had success with the Google Disavow Tool? Please leave a comment to share your experiences with the Tool.
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