Bing Releases a “Disavow Links” Tool for Webmasters

The Bing Webmaster’s blog recently announced the addition of a “Disavow Links” feature that now allows Webmasters to protect their sites from malicious link building that could result in a website’s rankings being penalised on that search engine.

The incidence of this type of negative link building to impact a competitor’s website is not that widespread, but with Google’s increasing focus on targeting bad links, it could be an issue for some companies, or there may be a need to review past link building programs that might have used sites that are now being seen as poor quality.

So this new Bing tool is very useful as it enables the person responsible for a business’s website indexing to tell the Bing search engine that their site shouldn’t be associated with un-trusted links to it from another particular website. It can be used to submit a page, directory, or domain URLs that may contain links to the business’s site that seem “unnatural” or appear to be from spam or low quality sites. In turn, Bing may use this information to identify sites that are seen as low quality within its index.

There is no limit on the number of links that can be disavowed via this tool and it’s great to protect against fraudulent link building activities by any competitors. Until now there was no way to protect a site from unwanted links added by competitors to diminish the trust vote by Bing and subsequent search engine positions. There probably won’t be dramatic changes in rankings as a result of using this tool, but the information shared does help Bing understand more clearly the intent around links pointing to your site.

So this is a good response from growing industry demand for the inclusion of such a feature within Bing’s Webmaster Tools. It shows that Bing is actively responding to such requests, which will increase their favour within the SEO industry in the future and SEOs are already requesting that Google implements a similar tool within its own version of Webmaster tools.

If you’d like to know more about how the “Disavow Links” tool can benefit your website, contact us now for more information.

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