Process of lifting penalty and Link Removal

In my last article for Link Audit of a website, now I will explain further steps that we should consider.

Once you are done with the list of backlinks that you want to keep and the ones to be removed, follows the following steps.

Create a Google spreadsheet and keep all backlinks on it that you want to remove. Google says that they don’t trust on another external source that’s why Google spreadsheets are suggested.

Before we submit those links to Google Disavow tool, we must first try to remove those links via contacting their webmasters. Contact details can be found on the website or on Who’s Domain Tools, Facebook, Twitter, Google plus etc. But at once use only one method and if you don’t get a reply then try another.

Send at least emails 3 times to webmaster requesting for link removal. Some webmaster responds after the first email, communicate with them and assist in removing backlink. Second and third email should be sent to those who never responded. Document everything on Google spreadsheet, Date’s on which email has been sent and if backlink has been removed or not. Document each and everything on a spreadsheet.

Now prepare a final list of backlinks that are still live and we want to remove them.

Prepare Disavow file:

Create a text file and place all the backlinks that need to be removed in the mentioned format.

Disavowing a specific link from a domain

# example.com removed most links but missed these

http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

Disavowing complete domain

# Contacted owner of abc.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:abc.com

With “#” we are making comments.

Also, include a link to the Google spreadsheet that you have prepared in your request followed by “#”.

Uploading Disavow file:

Once you finalized the disavow file. You can upload it on Google Webmaster:

1. Go to the disavow links tool page.
2. Select your website.
3. Click Disavow links.
4. Click Choose file.
5. And Submit.

For any queries you have can drop me an email.