Is SEO Dead? And, Did Google Disavow Kill It?

If you haven’t heard, Google recently announced this Disavow tool inside the Webmaster Tools system and it basically allows you to make it so that Google does not count incoming links to your site from certain places.

The idea is that when low quality links are affecting your rankings, you have the ability to get on there and say “okay, I want you to ignore those links”. So, basically what happens here – if you look at the overall picture – Google is making it so that it’s now crowd-sourcing the detection of crappy links.

SEO is DEAD!

This is going to do some real damage to the SEO world. Personally, I think that SEO in the traditional sense is DEAD. And I’m not the type who likes to say “X is dead” all the time because I think people do that crap just to be provocative. But I think, in this particular case, SEO really is dying. It is in its death throes right now and it’s going to be dead really soon.

That’s because Google is actively fighting all the traditional things that SEO people used to do in terms of building backlinks. Usually, the backlinks were to go out there and find low hanging fruit and put backlinks on there, get them to directories and stuff like that. But the problem is that they’re low quality links and Google knows that you’re doing all that stuff and they don’t want you to do it!

So, the Disavow tool is really just going to help make sure that that happens.

What To Do? 

Now, here’s what I think you need to be doing as a blogger because of this Disavow tool.

I definitely think that you need to reconsider having easy links on your blog if that’s what you do. Now, what I mean by that is if you have a bunch of sites in your blog roll, you might want to consider taking those things off.

If you have comments that are “do follow” and if you allow people to post “do follow” backlinks on your blog in order to entice more commentary… well, just realize that a lot of those people are going to comment on your site because it’s low hanging fruit. They want the backlink and you might be artificially  increasing your comment counts but the discussion quality is generally going to blow chunks and you’re going to basically put your site out there where you might end up in somebody’s disavow list. If they’re seeing a lot of your URL in the disavow list, then they’re going to automatically say that your site isn’t worth that much because it’s a crowd source thing.

What I definitely think you should do is make sure that you do not allow any easy links on your site for that reason.

Also, if you’re doing any kind of structured SEO right now in terms of buying some monthly service where they’re supposed to help you build backlinks… STOP IT! Just knock it off!

All that stuff is dying and if you’re still paying for it you’re just wasting your money. I’ve used sources like these in the past and I’ve turned them all off a long time ago because I saw the writing on the wall.

Do not pay for any monthly SEO service where their job is to go out there and build backlinks for you. Not only are you wasting money but there’s a really good chance that it’s going to negatively affect your SEO. You don’t want to do that. Just don’t waste your money on that.

What you really want to do is concentrate on providing really quality stuff for your readers. Stuff that they’re going to want to share. You want everything to be natural. You want people to link to you because they find that your stuff is of high quality. Let it happen organically!

This has been my approach to SEO for most of the 14 years that I’ve been in the business. Like I said, I have tried a few of these link building services a long, long time ago. I tried them for a few months, turned them off because the whole thing made me nervous. And now, everything’s coming telling us why it made me nervous.

“Old School” SEO Is A Waste Of Your Time

So, don’t worry about SEO. I think SEO – in the traditional sense – is a waste of your time.

If you write for human beings and really concentrate on providing them useful stuff, stuff that people are going to want to share out on social media and share with your friends and share via email…guess what? Your SEO will take care of itself because it’s going to happen organically. And that’s what Google wants.

Google wants this stuff to happen organically. They’re trying to provide the best quality search results to the people who are searching on Google.com. So whenever you’re doing all these things that are trying to game them, they’re trying to find you and knock you down! So, why even play that game?

So, anyway, that’s what I think you should do about the Google Disavow tool. I think the old-school SEO world is probably going to have a freak out over it. But, I think people who are doing things right and are concentrating on providing real value… you’ve got nothing to worry about.

I think it’s actually going to do the world a lot of good and I think it’s going to help Google provide even better search results for us.