A disavow file is a tool website owners and SEO professionals use to communicate to search engines that they do not want certain backlinks pointing to their website to be considered when calculating search engine rankings.
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Search engines generally consider backlinks to signal the quality and relevance of your website’s content. However, some backlinks may be low-quality, spammy, or from websites that use black hat SEO practices. These backlinks can hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
The disavow file is a text file that lists the URLs of the backlinks that a website owner wants to disavow. The file is submitted to Google or another search engine through their webmaster tools. The search engine will then ignore those backlinks when calculating the website’s search engine rankings. It’s important to note that the disavow file should only be used as a last resort after other efforts to remove or disavow spammy backlinks have been exhausted.
The disavow file can have positive and negative consequences, depending on how it is used. Some potential consequences include:
- Positive impact on search engine rankings: If a website has many low-quality or spammy backlinks pointing to it, using the disavow file to remove those links can improve the website’s search engine rankings.
- Negative impact on search engine rankings: If the disavow file is used to remove backlinks that are actually high-quality and relevant to the website’s content, this can have a negative impact on the website’s search engine rankings.
- Difficulty in undoing changes: Once a disavow file has been submitted to a search engine, it can be difficult to undo the changes. This is because search engines may take some time to process the disavow file, and it may take even longer for the search engine to re-crawl and re-index the website with the new backlink profile.
- Risk of overuse: Overusing the disavow file by removing too many backlinks can result in the website appearing to intentionally manipulate search engine rankings, which can result in a penalty or even a ban from the search engine.
In general, it’s important to use the disavow file judiciously and only as a last resort after attempting to remove or disavow spammy backlinks through other means. It’s also important to carefully review the website’s backlink profile and only disavow those links that are harmful to the website’s search engine rankings.
To many of us, submitting a disavow link file to Google for their consideration should be done in CSV or text format. Most of us wouldn’t consider using an Excel file or Word document. But that is not always the case.
After reviewing the situation with your site, it appears that the unnatural links to your site were not really disavowed.. Looking into the details, the file you uploaded to the disavow tool appears to be a “DOCX” file, and not a normal text or CSV file. Because of that, we don’t have much that we can process there. To our systems, these lines look mostly like gibberish, so while we try to use them for the tool, they don’t map to the URLs that you probably wanted to submit.
I’d recommend submitting it again, in the proper format, so that it can be processed and used for the reconsideration request. As I don’t know for sure that your file would contain all of the relevant unnatural links, a proper submission would definitely help. A good way to double-check that we’re able to pick up the content is to use the “download” link after submitting, and to view it in Google Docs instead of downloading it as a CSV file.