On Monday, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller shared a screen cap of a comment Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog earlier this month about the Link Disavow tool. The comment is as follows:

“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the ‘domain:’ operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”

The more you know.

Mueller underlined the word “machete” in red, indicating that this is a point many webmasters are likely missing.

Google launched the Link Disavow tool back in October, enabling webmasters to tell Google specific links they want it to ignore, as to avoid potential penalties. If you’ve never used it, and haven’t learned much about it by now, you should start with this video from Cutts:

Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable

Image: Friday the 13th Part 3 (Paramount)