Google Says Don’t Delete Your Disavow File Prior To Uploading A New One

Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted an interesting tip to SEOs around disavow file submissions.

He said that you should not delete or remove the original disavow file when uploading a new one. He said instead, upload the new one, which will replace the old disavow file. The reason he said was because when you delete the old one and upload a new one, it generates two emails to the Google team and may confuse them when review manual actions.

Here are his tweets:

Quick SEO tip: no need to delete your old disavow links file before uploading a new one. You can just upload the new one.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 25, 2014

Some SEOs have been deleting the file first, then uploading new, which creates two emails, and sometimes that confuses folks.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 25, 2014

As you can see, I am making an assumption that the “folks” being confused are those at Google who review reconsideration requests.

So as a note, when you go ahead and revise your disavow files, make sure you just replace it and not delete the original one.

For more details, see our Disavow link tool category.