Google releases a new tool to disavow links

Today Google released a new tool to disavow links to help resolve negative search engine optimisation (SEO) results.This follows Microsoft’s Bing search engine who released a similar tool back in June. Most website owners can safely ignore this warning, unless you’re aware of bad links to your site you really would like to disassociate from. Previously Google just ignored them, but with their new “Penguin Update”, they now rank such links as negative. As such, this forced them to offer a tool to webmasters to clearly identify the unwanted links. Think about this tool as the ability to tell search engines which web sites you don’t trust that are linking to you, and that you’re aware they have a much lower page rank than yours does. If you’ve never received a warning from Google about bad links or spam links, you can probably ignore this. If you’ve received such a message in the past, go straight to the tool which is now active in Webmaster tools. 

If you’re looking to work on your SEO, SEOMoz has a useful post on 17 types of link spam to avoid, before someone adds you to their disavow links tool.