Google Launches Disavow Links Tool

I'm excited to see this. People in the SEO industry have clamored for this for a long time, but it wasn't really necessary until negative SEO has became more prevalent and effective the last few months. Traditionally, a link to your site could never really 'hurt' your domain. That has changed as Google has rolled out Penguin though and there are plenty of horror stories of people building 1000s of spammy links to a 3rd party sites and harming their rankings[1]. It wasn't fair to allow website owners to have their domains penalized for something that they have no control over...you can't prevent people from building malicious links to your site.

Also worth noting that Bing rolled this same feature out in June of this year[2].

[1]http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-... [2]http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive...

I would assume that this tool will serve as a new source of sites for Google's manual review team to take a look at.

It's odd they launched this though, as it's directly acknowledging 1) that "bad links" can hurt your rankings and 2) that the algorithm is not doing a good enough job/keeping up well enough.

Wow finally a tool for this damned links. :)

I have one site with many damned links maked for the competence.

Seems a bit embarrassing for Google (and before them Bing) to have to offer this. "Our giant well-funded teams of professionals can't tell the difference between organic links and those maliciously crafted to sabotage you, so it's up to you, individual webmasters with far fewer resources and visibility into the link graph, to fix this for us."

(Update: reading the official announcement and viewing the Cutts video, seems there's also a strong aspect of "pleading for amnesty" provided by this tool, for erasing past sleazy link-building efforts. Together with the repeated admonitions "most people shouldn't use this power user tool", it almost seems like a trick: like when the police publish that people with outstanding warrants have won a sweepstakes.)