Short summary:

Really cool tool if you were trying to game Google and got caught, but the vast majority of people don't need to use it.

Summary of the Video

Google's Matt Cutts released a video today talking about the new disavow links tool. Basically, what the tool does is allow you to submit links that you want to disavow or in other words - tell Google to ignore. In turn Google will take into consideration the request, and may or may not grant the request.

In the video Matt Cutts discussed the process. He said site owners should first make all attempts possible themselves to get the links removed by contacting the other site owners. He acknowledged that it would be impossible to get all of the links removed yourself, but he made it clear that you should make a strong effort to get them removed yourself.

Once you have done everything you can possibly do yourself, then you use the disavow links tool. He mentioned that part of the process is them looking at your sites link profile before you made the request so it would be painfully obvious if no attempt had been made to remove offending links.

Google then takes a look and makes a decision. They don't guarantee that it will help your site out. At most they look at it as a "strong recommendation" of what links to consider and ignore, but they will ultimately decide whether they will ignore the links or not.

I'm not the type of person who counts how many instances a person says a particular phrase or "umms" and "awwws". However, he emphatically stated over and over again that this tool was a power user tool and that the vast majority of site owners did not need to use it. The only site owners that would need to use it are those who received a notice saying that Google detected suspicious/unnatural links to their site.

He also answered the question can you a reavow and link that you disavowed? He said yes, but it would take a really long time to get that link back.

Summary of Entertaining Comments

The usual Google hater's left comments using obscene, and profane curse words. Then you have the conspiracy theorists who think Google is just doing this as a clever way to learn about link networks they haven't been able to detect. You also have the "we want the google analytics organic keyword data back" crowd.

Then there were the "I love Google so much, if there were a way for a corporate entity to be the child of my first born, I'd be first in line" crowd. Finally, even the "ever peddling salesman" showed up, promoting his "link detox", for just a small amount of money or a tweet of course.

Overall, all it was an interesting video. However, not interesting enough to make me watch it a second time. ;)