Need to Disavow Links? Use a Machete

There’s always a lot of talk regarding Google’s Disavow links Tool. Should webmasters disavow every single link they have and start on a clean slate? Perhaps webmasters should maybe disavow small batches of links and test what happens?

According to Matt Cutts, shared by John Mueller on Google Plus, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, states:

Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.

When looking at the machete approach, it can come off as intimidating. To have to disavow links that you built can seem like your efforts came to waste. Although it may seem like a bit scary to start off on a clean slate, it takes a lot less time than using the scalpel-like method because you don’t need to scrutinize every website to weed out the bad links.