Yesterday at Pubcon, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, announced the release of a new tool for webmasters – The Google Disavow Links tool. The feature allows webmasters to upload a text file of bad backlinks that they want Google to ignore.

Disavow Links allows users the chance to clean up the link practices that used to work effectively but Google has since devalued, such as mass article spam, comment spam and exact match anchor text. The tool lets users upload one URL per line of the text file, but also includes a couple of extra features including;

• The ability to ignore link from all pages of one website using domain:http://examplesite.com
• The facility to add comments to document your efforts to remove the links already
• A single text file per domain allowing downloads, edits and re uploads by multiple users

Google will use the text file as a ‘very strong suggestion’ of the links that people don’t want the weight of that link to count, but ‘not something that they have to abide by’, treating a disavowed link similar to no follow. The whole process will take a few weeks with Google reindexing the pages to attach the attribute. Matt Cutts also recommends explicitly mentioning in any reconsideration requests that you have used the disavow links tool.

This doesn’t appear to be a get out of jail free card though, with Cutts recommending that webmasters should continue to manually contact websites to remove the links. Google’s message is that this tool should be used after manually contacting webmasters, to remove the ‘last fraction of bad backlinks’.

In a subsequent video explaining the tool, Cutts makes it abundantly clear that the tool should only be used by advanced webmasters, with several remarks including ‘this is a power user tool… most people shouldn’t need to use this’ suggesting that the features should only be used in extreme cases.

It is also clear that misusing this tool does come at a cost, if you want to disavow a link and then re-avow the same link at a later date, Google may add less weight to the link than what it had before the disavowing. Google will then do extensive checks on the claim, so it may take a while to return.

Both the name, Disavow, which means to strongly refuse to owning something, and the amount of times Cutts mentions caution in using this on his video (see below), suggests that misuse of the tool can do some real damage to a website - Be careful! To find out more see the full video or check out my colleague Dave Hellowell’s in-depth look at the tool over on the ionSearch blog.