• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 17, 2012

Google released a tool this week called Disavow Links that allows marketers to ask Google to remove specific spam-type links coming into their Web sites. Matt Cutts, Google's spam expert, points to unnatural links as one reason for the tool.

Cutts said it's not a tool that everyone should use. For those who have emailed and called Google without receiving a response, he said to disavow links by first reviewing the list of links the engine might have sent as a warning to suggest the types of links the company might want removed. Google will allow marketers to download a list of links sorted by the date the engine discovered them.

WordStream founder Larry Kim views the tool at a "get out of jail, free card." The tool comes after months of downplaying the impact of negative SEO, he tells us. It not only proves that negative SEO is a real issue, but also hopes that it makes link cleanup a little better than impossible.

The first version of the tool allows marketers to upload a text file of links -- one URL per line -- that Google should ignore. And after marketers have gone through all that trouble of putting together the list, Cutts said Google will take the list into consideration, but not necessarily follow through and disavow the links. "We reserve the right to look at these and believe it isn't something the user intended to do," he said in a video. "We will take it as a strong suggestion and treat it as a no-follow, dropping the link out of the processing."

Once the marketer uploads the list of links to disavow, it could take weeks for them to disappear because Google must recrawl and index the pages.