If you were recently given a manual action against your HVAC site, or if you think you\’re about to get one, then you will want o remove any offending links from your site. If you can\’t do that yourself, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains connected to your site.
Google’s disavow tool lets webmasters to notify Google of poor-quality links pointing to their website that they don’t want associated with their site. It helps SEOs tell Google what externa links should be considered when Google evaluates ranking factors.
In an Office-hours hangout, Google’s John Mueller was asked about a bad outcome that came out of Google’s link disavow tool. After the user uploaded a disavow file, their ranking collapsed after just a few days of the upload.
Mueller addressed the timing between uploading the disavow and ranking changes, all while revealing the amount of time it takes for Google to work the contents of a disavow into the algorithm.
Here is the question:
“Does using the disavow tool raise a flag in the algorithm and trigger a soft penalty on a website for possibly engaging in link building in the past?
We’ve used this tool to remove hundreds of spammy links and our site collapsed a few days later.
Should we remove the disavow tool and how long will it take for a site to return to normal traffic and ranking?
Or is there a permanent black mark against this website for using the disavow tool?”
So how long does it take for the Disavow Tool to work its magic? You can find out in the following video. The question was asked at the 17:57 minute mark, while the answer can be found at the 20:50 mark:
