In Seattle recently at a SMX Advanced Q&A event, Matt Cutts let it slip (or perhaps intentionally) that Google was working on a disavow button which will be included in Google’s Webmaster Tools. This tool will supposedly allow users to manually “unlink” back links to a website. So, if you have back links from websites or networks you believe are spam neighborhoods, supposedly Google’s button will allow webmasters to “erase” the back links from linking to your site.

Why is such a tool important

It’s long been believed (and I personally have proven) that it’s possible to negatively affect a competitor’s website by creating back links to the competitors’ website on bad neighborhoods or network of sites known or believed to be spammy. The creation of such a button is nothing short of admission that a problem exists and negative SEO is possible.

Will the button work? Yes and No! It will offer a quick and simple way of getting rid of back links individually but as most SEO’s are far too familiar with, it’s extremely easy to build a lot of back links in bad neighborhoods in a very short amount of time. It’s doubtful any tool from Google can easily get rid of thousands and thousands of negative back links. It seems like a tool Google implemented to cover its own tracks legally.

Maybe there will be a way to only include back links you want and disallow all others but as for now, the word on the street is the disavow button is only intended to remove back links from individual pages and only one at a time, making it impossible to use if you have a site that’s bombarded with negative back links from tools like ScrapeBox.

Still though, it should come in handy and perhaps assist at least a bit with the manual process of contacting webmasters asking for links to be removed. We all know the success rate of doing that.

Got a comment or question? Please feel free to add your view and what impact to SEO companies and websites this new feature from Google might have.