Google has provided a very powerful (read, dangerous) tool to help you get rid of back link spam. It’s called the Disavow Link Tool. You can read a full explanation of it on Google’s Support Page, but basically it works like this:
- Create a .txt file containing either individual links, or entire domains that you consider spammy that are currently linking to your site. This .txt file needs to be line separated. So don’t ever include more than one link per line.
- You can create comments in the text file to describe things. Just place a ‘#’ at the beginning of the line and everything in that line will be ignored by Google.
- To disavow a certain page or link, you would create a line something like:
http://spam.example.com/examplepage.html - To disavow an entire domain, you would create a line something like:
domain:example.com - Once you have created your .txt file, upload it to the Disavow Links Panel in your Webmasters Tools.
A sample disavow.txt could look something like the following:
#This is a comment above a single link http://example.com/example/stuffs/example/spam.html #This is a comment above an entire domain domain:example.com
I mentioned it before, but it’s worth re-iterating. The Google Disavow Links tool can be dangerous. Your backlinks are an integral part of your search engine ranking and if you disavow links that you aren’t sure are spammy or very low quality, you could see a negative impact.
That said, it’s also very powerful because if your site somehow starts getting spammed from various disreputable sources like porn sites, spam sites or general low quality links, it will be in your best interest to disavow those links and tell Google that you aren’t affiliated with the links, just ignore them.