Should you disavow backlinks? (Almost never)

The first time I saw a list of every site linking to one of my sites, I wanted to clean it up.

Dozens of spammy domains. Stats sites. Pages in languages I don't speak. The instinct is to get rid of all of it.

That instinct is wrong, and acting on it can cost you rankings.

What the disavow tool actually does

Google's disavow tool lets you upload a list of links or domains and tell Google: please don't count these when you look at my site.

That sounds harmless. Here's the catch. Google doesn't only ignore the bad links you list. It ignores every link you list, including any that were quietly helping you.

So if you disavow a whole batch of domains because a tool flagged them, and a few of them were real, you've just thrown away real links.

What Google says

Google's help page for the tool is pretty direct about it. It calls disavowing an advanced feature, and says most sites will not need to use it.

According to that page, you should only disavow when two things are both true:

1. You have a lot of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing at your site, and
2. Those links have caused a manual action against your site, or likely will.

The page also says to try getting the links removed at the source first, and warns that using the tool wrong can hurt your performance in search.

A manual action is a penalty a human reviewer at Google applies. If you have one, it shows up in Search Console under Security & Manual Actions. If that report says "No issues detected," you don't have one.

Who actually needs it

The realistic case looks like this:

• You (or an SEO you hired) bought links, joined a link network, or ran a campaign of keyword-stuffed guest posts.
• Google noticed and gave you a manual action for unnatural links, or you're worried it will.
• You've asked the sites to remove the links and they haven't.

That's who the tool is for. People cleaning up their own past link building.

Random junk that showed up on its own isn't part of that. Google's link spam updates were built to neutralize unnatural links automatically, so those links are already being ignored. I wrote about where they come from in Why are spam sites linking to me?

What about "toxic score" tools?

Some SEO tools give every link a toxicity score and suggest disavowing anything above a number. Keep in mind that the score is the tool's opinion, not Google's. Google doesn't publish a toxicity score, and it doesn't use one from a third-party tool.

Those tools can be useful for spotting a pattern, like a sudden flood of links with the same anchor text. But "the tool said 87% toxic" isn't, on its own, a reason to disavow anything.

If you do need to disavow

If you're in the narrow group above, here's the short version:

1. Try to get the links removed first. Email the site owners and keep a record.
2. Build a plain text file, one domain per line in the form domain:example.com. Disavowing whole domains is usually safer than individual pages.
3. Upload it through the disavow links tool in Search Console, for the right property.
4. If you have a manual action, file a reconsideration request explaining what you cleaned up.

Then leave it alone. Changes take time to show.

What I do instead

For my own sites, I ignore junk and spend the time on the links that matter.

In DR Buddy that means running a backlink scan, ignoring the Probably junk pile, and monitoring the handful of real links from inside articles. If one of those disappears or switches to nofollow, I find out. That's a much better use of an afternoon than building a disavow file nobody needed.