Bing Adds Ability to Disavow Links in Webmaster Tools

Right out of the blue Bing added a service allowing webmasters to disavow links from within their webmaster tools account. It's a bit odd because Google is the one that has been penalizing questionable links of late, not Bing. So this caught us a little off guard.

While we haven't heard much from Bing on the subject of penalties for links before, it's entirely possible that this is more of a reporting tool than a disavow tool. It looks like Bing wants to know where the bad links are at, and having the target site report them might be an interesting twist.

How it may affect the site where the link has been disavowed is yet known. Another thing to consider is that this feature will be used to help train an algorithm in detecting low quality links. Regardless, Bing has yet to tell us exactly how the disavow feature works or what kind of affect it will have, which is why we're not suggesting you use this tool just yet.

However, if you're interested in taking it for a spin you will find the tool within Bing's Webmaster Tools. All you need to do is choose which of your sites you wish to work with and click Configure my site > Disavow links. Then you'll have the ability to disavow an entire domain, a directory or even a specific URL.

Again, it's unclear what affect, if any, use of this service may have. In the official Bing's Blog Post about this subject, Duane Forrester noted not to expect to see any change in ranking after using the tool, and that there is no limit to the number of URL's you can disavow.