Why a Website Owner May Wish to Disavow Backlinks

Malicious email messages can be sent to virtually anybody in attempts to either deceive or intimidate them into serving the senders' agendas and buying their products or services. If the target is the owner of a fairly small website, the fact that a significant portion of their livelihood likely depends on their website remaining in a highly ranked status on search engines can be taken advantage of by malicious parties. If the site owner only has a basic grasp of SEO concepts and techniques, they may erroneously believe that their online presence and business are legitimately at risk when an email message threatens to create many spam backlinks pointing to the site. Since a critical factor measured by Google and other search engines is the number of quality backlinks a website is currently maintaining, it may seem reasonable to believe that a sudden influx of spam backlinks will genuinely reduce the website's prominence in the search engines' algorithms. Even if a website's owner is willing to search through many websites to try to get them removed manually, it may not be feasible to keep every spam backlink cleaned out. However, any website owner has the capacity to instruct Google itself to consider any number of specific websites and domains as part of a "blacklist" that will prevent any backlinks on those sites from factoring into the website's SEO. This is called disavowing backlinks, and it involves uploading a text file containing a list of URLs and domains into Google itself via its "Disavow Links" tool. Disavowing backlinks is an important option for website owners to have because, even though attempts to damage another party's online property and blackmail that party can likely be punished as cybercrime in theory, it is often the case that the malicious parties involved are based in different countries. It is often difficult to the point of unfeasible for the owner of a small website to successfully seek legal action or justice against parties who do not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the same country as his or her own. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/8urndd/oneguysendmeemailtocompletelydestroyyour/.