In previous years, it was typical for many small and some larger website owners to use 'Black Hat' methods of improving their Google search ranking, and for a worryingly long period these methods were very effective. However, more recently, Google has made some significant changes to its search engine algorithms, meaning that these Black Hat techniques that proved so effective in the past now hinder one's website ranking instead of improving it.
Now whilst this should seem like a positive outcome, companies are now utilising these Black Hat methods on their competitors' websites in order to ruin their online presence by causing them to suffer from the Google penalty. In response to the SEO war that is occurring between website owners, Google has created their 'disavow' tool which can be used to remove negative backlinks from their websites. Although the question should be, whether the Google Disavow tool is capable of providing targeted websites with fast recovery, or whether it is too late to save your website's reputation?
Firstly, it needs to be considered, that once the Google disavow tool has taken effect, there is an estimate of 'a few weeks,' before your site will be crawled. Although, Matt Cutts, who is the leader of the web spam team at Google, has stated that Google's engineers 'refresh a large fraction of the index every few days,' so instead of waiting several weeks, your website could potentially be re-crawled within less than 5 days. Alas, the chance of the process taking 5 days is still a long shot; therefore, you should anticipate at least one week before your site is re-crawled.
Secondly, another aspect of the recovery process that you need to take into consideration is how long it will take your website to get back on its feet after receiving such a penalty. Unfortunately, there is speculation that it could take several months before your website is back in Google's good books, meaning that there is little hope of your recovery taking 3-5 days or a couple of weeks.
The final factor that you must consider is just how long the Disavow process actually takes. If you own a small blog with few backlinks from other websites, then fortunately for you, creating your Disavow file should only take a matter of hours. On the other hand, if your site has a larger amount of backlinks from other websites, then you may have to sort through hundreds or even thousands of websites to evaluate which are benefiting or hindering your SEO performance. But that is simply the beginning. Once you have checked all the sites with backlinks to your website, you must then wait for Google to review your Disavow file, and they may choose to ignore you request autonomously.
To conclude, I believe that it is worthwhile running through the Google Disavow process, and the recovery process of your site, in order to come to a reasonable conclusion as to whether a 'fast' recovery is truly possible.
1. The Google Disavow process takes a lot of time and effort in checking all of your backlinks.
2. Google has to review your removal requests and accept them.
3. If Google does choose to accept your Disavow request, then you have to wait for the search engine crawlers to re-crawl your website and the websites that provided backlinks to your site.
4. After taking such a penalty from Google, it could take months for your site to be back in Google's good books, and prove that you deserve to rank high in their search engine.
With all of these points in mind, it seems clear that while the Google Disavow tool is certainly helpful for eliminating links that are hindering your site, once you've taken the penalty from Google, it is going to take some time before you can consider your site fully recovered. In fact, it is perfectly plausible to suggest that once the damage is done to your site, there is simply no coming back, and you may have to start from scratch. Your best hope is to respond to negative SEO backlinks as soon as you can, completely avoid using Black Hat methods to attempt to improve your search engine rank, and always focus on quality over quantity with your backlinks.