This has been one of the most talked about topics since the birth of Penguin 2.0 and that is, do we have to be afraid of the Disavow Tool or can it be trusted to recover penalised sites? Well Google’s own Matt Cutts (Head of the Web Spam team) came out and answered publicly on Twitter to a question, stating that the Disavow Tool can help with a Penguin impact.

This has been a big relief to many webmasters out there who have been impacted and can now safely use the tool without hesitating. The only problem is that we still do not know for sure how long it would take for a website to recover from a penalisation after using the disavow tool. My personal option would be to use the disavow tool to remove low quality and irrelevant links pointing to your website and then submit a reconsideration request to webmaster or selecting the fetch as Google option and pinging to get your website read as quick as possible.

If the disavow Tool works according to Matt Cutts then this cannot be ignored and using the tool effectively could be the difference between a successful recovery or a further penalisation by the panda update which is now a rolling update. It will also benefit your website in the long run, as Google could come out and roll out the Penguin update at any time and this time if you have removed the links which are harming your site in theory you shouldn’t be affected.

Although some people do not believe what Matt says most of the time, it is clear in what the message is he is trying to get across to webmasters which is; Google rewards high quality websites and penalises websites to be considered as spam. Hence why Google released this tool to help us recover and realise what we have done wrong.

Blog Post by Jordan Whitehead