Should Chiropractors Use The Google Disavow Links Tool?

Last Updated: May 31, 2019

Google has been working hard to improve the quality of its search results this year with the release of Panda and Penguin.  Chiropractic websites that had too many low quality links and/or too many exact match anchor text links were penalized. If you had been doing traditional SEO over the last few years you were most certainly in trouble.

It was actually possible this year form your site to be damaged by SEO.  Your links can have a negative impact for the first time since Google started. For sites that were hit with these penalties it can be very difficult to recover because it would mean removing the links from the locations they were posted in.  It can be nearly impossible to track them all down.

Google’s solution to this issue is the new “Disavow Links” tool.  This tool gives you the ability to report your bad links to Google so that they can be discounted from your rank.  Google has said that they will work to discount the majority of the links over a few weeks of time.

The Good News about the Disavow Tool

The good news is that if your website dropped in rank because of poor search engine optimization practices, you now have a way to work at correcting the issue.  Again this is not something that will take place overnight, but Matt Cutts has said over a few weeks of time you should see a change in rankings.  If you have a URL that is very important to your company this is great news.  Many business were penalized for things that they never knew were being done.  Their SEO teams put them in a compromised position.

The bad news about this new tool is that it gives Google the ability to collect a great deal of information on sources of bad links.  Website owners are going to be handing Google the keys to their grey and black hat SEO techniques.  Google will be able to use this information to tweak their algorithms to penalize even more websites.  If you are receiving a link from a website that is deemed to be a bad source of links from all this reporting, you are likely to also receive a penalty.

This type of reporting will bring an end to SEO as we have known it over the last decade.  There will no longer be any easy to find link sources for your website.  Sources such as: Forums, Blog Comments, Web 2.0, Article Directories, Blog Networks, Website Directories, and Social Bookmarks will become much less widely used.  All the sites that were very easy to get links from will be seen as low quality, and will likely result in penalties.

With the information generated by this tool Google will have more data to adjust its algorithm than ever before.  It only makes sense that if they discover that a number of websites used a particular website to build low quality links, then other websites receiving links from that website would be seen to be following the same practices.  The fallout from this will cause many websites to be sacrificed to create a new quality and authority based landscape.

The use of automated SEO tools will end at least as it pertains to quality link building.  It’s likely that these tools will find a new home as they will be targeted at negative SEO.  If you can’t grow your own site, you can bring the competition down around you.  It will be interesting to see how it all balances out.  I believe that companies will have to have an offensive and defensive strategy in the near future to survive in competitive markets.  An offensive team building a strong structure, and a defensive team watching out for negative attacks from competitors.

The future of links looks to be headed in the direction of authorship and social media signals.  You will have to account for the links that you have, and they will be much more precious than the thousands of automated links that were built in the past.  Your authority will be the measure of your success, and it will be much more difficult to develop.

A strong link will be one that an actual person has looked at and has taken the time to approve.  Any website that is weak enough to allow an automated software tool break in and post a link will be deemed untrustworthy, and the value of that link will be low or damaging.  The problem is that there are not a large number of websites that fall into the quality category right now.  The Google Webmaster Guidelines will give you a good picture of what you should be looking to avoid.

The New SEO Strategy

As I stated earlier it’s time to focus on posting high quality content, and becoming social media leader in your area of expertise.  Whether you are a local business or a global product you need to spend the time necessary to build a following.  The social signals generated by this will determine the rank of your products.  If you post content that does not receive a social thumbs up, you are unlikely to see that content rank.  There will be no reason to post low quality content in this type of environment.  Quantity will be quickly outweighed by quality.

As a note of caution, to protect you from the wave that will certainly come, take the time to look at the backlinks that you currently have.  If you see problems there do everything you can to have those links removed from your website by contacting the webmasters providing them.  In many cases this is not possible which means you may have to rely on the new tool if you see your rank drop.  It’s also important to stop any automated link building practices or low quality link exchanges.

If you don’t feel you have the ability to accomplish this task you may want to start looking for a professional that can help you understand what you have going on and how to fix it.  There will be increasing numbers of individuals that will offer their services in this area.  A new business model has now been created to clean up the mess.

By Mike Hamilton