How to Disavow Links in Bing Webmaster Tools?

The important aspect of off-page SEO is to build links pointing to your website. These links are one of the factors deciding the ranking of your pages in the search engines. At the same time most webmasters start building unnatural backlinks without limit before finally getting penalized by search engines. Once you realized there are manipulated inbound links affecting your ranking in search results, there are few options available to fix the situation. The final option is to inform Google and Bing using disavow links tool to ignore the suspicious backlinks. In our earlier article, we have explained how to submit disavow links in Google Search Console and in this article, we will explain how to submit disavow links in Bing Webmaster Tools account.

Finding Unnatural Links

The first step in the process is to find the unnatural links pointing to your website. In order find these unnatural links you first need to have an insight on total number inbound links to your site.

• Create your account in Bing Webmaster Tools using your Microsoft email.
• You have to add and verify your site in order to use all the features Bing search engine offers.
• Go to “Backlinks” option available under “SEO” section.
• Here you can see all the inbound links pointing to your site based on domains, pages and anchor texts.
• Click on the “Download All” button to download the list to your computer for offline analysis.

You can check the linked pages and find any suspicious links are available without your knowledge. Remember, your competitor can also leave your website’s links on irrelevant websites to destroy your backlink profile. Below are some of the ways to find unnatural links:

• Check number of links – for example, a site linking 1K+ URLs on your site is a suspicious one. There are some exceptions to this logic like blogspot, wordpress.com and many other social sites. You can safely ignore those social domains.
• Anchor text to confirm you did not create the links and is not relevant to the linked page. In most cases, you will find spam anchor texts in Japanese, Chinese or Russian languages.
• Check the relevancy of the link and your page content.

Find the domains and pages having too many links with irrelevant anchor texts and not related to your linked page content. There are high possibilities that these links are considered as spam links by search engines. Prepare a list of pages and domains to take necessary action a a next step.

Before Disavowing Links

Disavowing links in Bing Webmaster Tools account is a very task. However, we recommend you to check the followings before submitting the links for disavowing.

• Make sure you or your SEO company did not create those links. If you have created the links, try to contact the website owner to remove the link from their website. You can use the contact form available on the websites to reach out the owner.
• Try to remove the links even though they have nofollow attributes.
• Mark all pornography and irrelevant domains for disavowing.

After you finish this home work, move on to next step for submitting the details to Bing.

How to Submit URLs for Disavow Links Tool?

Disavow links tool helps webmasters to inform Bing about the links not to be considered for Bing search engine ranking. Google does not offer this tool as part of the Search Console interface. However, Bing makes this easy to find the tool right inside your account.

• Login to your Bing webmaster tools account and select the site you want to submit the unnatural links.
• Go to “SEO > Backlinks” section and click on the “Disavow Links” option.
• You can submit individual page, directory or domain that contains the unnatural link to your pages.

• Once you selected Page, Directory or Domain option, enter the URL and click on the “Disavow” button.
• Again, confirm the pop-up by clicking “Disavow” button.

• Remember, Bing allows you to submit 100 URLs at once. You need to split and submit multiple times if you have more than 100 domains to disavow. You will see an error message like “The field DisavowUrls must be a string or array type with a maximum length of '100'” when submitting more than 100 URLs.

• After successful submission, you can view the list of disavowed URLs along with the date disavowed.

Reavow or Delete Submitted Domains

You may want to reavow the submitted entry after some time. Also, you want to remove the wrongly submitted entries to avoid they affecting your ranking.

• Hover over any of the submitted entries to see a small link icon at the end of the entry showing as “Reavow”.
• Click on the “Reavow” link to remove the disavowed submission.
• Instead of doing one by one, you can select multiple entries and reavow all of them at once.
• You can also download all disavowed entries as a CSV file to keep for your reference.

Tips on Using Bing Disavow Links Tool

As you can see, it is super simple to use disavow links tools in Bing Webmaster Tools account. However, remember the following points when using the tools:

• Don’t expect immediate improvement in the ranking, it may take considerable time for Bing to recalculate the ranking of your site by excluding the submitted links.
• There is no limit on number of links for using disavow link tool. But ensure you use this tool after trying to contact the site owners to remove the links.
• Disavowed links will be still showing under the “All Links” section hence there is no way to confirm whether the submitted links are disavowed by Bing or not.