If you know anything about SEO, you probably know that your backlink profile is a crucial ranking factor. What you might not realise is that low quality or spammy backlinks can actually have a negative effect on your ranking.

With this in mind, you need to know what Google’s disavow tool is and how it works. In some cases, it can be a good idea to disavow, or ‘disown’ certain backlinks, especially when they are coming from obviously spam-related websites.

In this article, I’m going to cover some of the things you need to know about disavowing links.

What Is Link Disavowing?

To put it simply, disavowing links involves telling Google that you want it to ignore certain links back to your website. There are a number of reasons why you might do this, but usually it’s because the links are coming from a low quality source that negatively affects your SEO rank.

The Google disavow tool – Basically, if you identify links that you don’t want, you can use Google’s disavow tool to tell it to ignore these links. It can be tricky to figure out which links to ignore and which to keep, but we’ll get to that in the next section.

What Links Should I Disavow?

Now, the exact situation around link disavowing is actually a little bit cloudy. Some people believe that Google already ignores spam links, and that there’s no point in using the disavow tool to ask it to ignore them.

However, it’s better to be safe than sorry – right?

Personally, I’d still recommend using the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore low quality links. Ultimately, it’s not going to cause any problems, but it could result in great search rank improvements if Google wasn’t already ignoring these links.

If you’re a technological sort of person who enjoys learning new skills, then you might be considering learning web development. Alternatively, you might be trying to build your web development skills so that you become more skilled and employable to open up your career options in the future.

Fortunately, the rapid increase in the size of the internet means that it’s easier than ever to learn web development, with a huge range of resources available.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short list of the best ways to learn basic web development skills. They include:

Take An Online Course

There is a huge range of online courses teaching basic web development skills available today. Platforms like CodeAcademy and Udemy contain complete web development courses which will teach you both front and back-end coding skills.

If you’re serious about learning basic web development skills then I’d definitely recommend paying for a course. There are plenty of free courses out there, but in my experience paid courses tend to offer much more support and a better overall learning experience including team building exercises.

Practice, Practice, Practice!

Once you’ve learned the absolute basics of web development, the best thing to do is to just keep practising. For example, if you’ve worked through a HTML/CSS front-end development course, consider building your own website from scratch to make sure that you’re familiar with everything.