The world of SEO and Reputation Management share similarities in both strategy and tactics. We use keywords and links to effect a change within Google, sometimes its to highlight information, other times its to bury the information. With the advent of Penguin that has started to look at who links to you and penalize sites that try to game the Google search results, it’s becoming more important for websites to monitor their link profiles in order to maintain their Google rankings.

Not too long ago, if you wanted to game the Google results, you would submit your site to some websites that would add a number of links back to your site and raise your Google search profile. Google became wise to this practice and introduced Penguin, which would not count the links and/or penalize a site for engaging in that practice. When they introduced the Penguin, they also introduced the link disavow tool which allowed companies to tell Google they do not recognize the links as being legitimate.

The reason for the disavow tool is to prevent unscrupulous businesses from trying to knock another business from the top of Google search rankings by submitting that site to a known toxic site. However, it’s up to the company or business to monitor their link profile and actively submit disavows. If they do not, they are susceptible to one can only be described as a link attack on your site.

So while linking continues to be a highly used tactic by SEOs to get ranking, you still need to monitor the link profile proactively to prevent a website from being tanked by someone who wants to knock you from the top spot and move their business up a few places.