Disavow – Google's tool for rejecting links, and when not to use it

Definition

Disavow is Google's tool for rejecting backlinks: a text file of links or domains that Google should disregard when it assesses the website. It is used only when many spam links have led, or risk leading, to a manual action. Most websites never need it.

What is disavow?

Disavow is a tool from Google where you upload a text file of backlinks that Google should disregard when it assesses the website. The tool is not in Search Console's menu but on a separate Google page, linked from the help page below, and it requires you to be an owner of the property in Search Console. Google itself describes it as an advanced feature that can harm the website's visibility if used incorrectly, according to Google's help page on disavowing links.

The background is that backlinks affect rankings, and that links created to manipulate rankings break Google's spam policies. Anyone who has bought links, taken part in link networks or inherited a link profile from a previous agency can have hundreds of links that Google judges to be unnatural. Disavow is the way to say: do not count these.

It is not a tool for routine cleaning of the link profile, and it does not improve rankings in itself. It only removes something that does harm – if something does harm.

When should you use disavow?

Disavow should only be used when two conditions are met at the same time: the website has a considerable number of spam links, artificial links or low-quality links, and the links have led to a manual action or are likely to do so. That is how Google phrases the conditions, and Google also writes that most websites do not need the tool at all – the systems disregard most link spam on their own without you having to do anything.

In practice that means three situations:

• A manual action for unnatural links is listed in Search Console. Then disavow is part of the fix, together with asking for the removal of the links that can be removed. The whole flow, from diagnosis to request for review, is in Google penalty or lost rankings?.
• You know that links have been bought in volume, for example after a change of agency, and the links cannot be removed.
• Someone else has created spam links to the website, so-called negative SEO. Google normally disregards them, and disavow only becomes relevant if they result in a manual action or you judge the risk to be real.

You get the list of incoming links from the Links report in Search Console or from a link tool.

An algorithmic drop after a core update is not a reason to use disavow. There are no links to disavow, and disavow changes nothing.

How the disavow file works

The disavow file is a text file (.txt) with one URL or one domain per line, uploaded for a property in Search Console. This is what it looks like according to Google's help page:

• One URL per line for individual pages that link to your website, or domain: followed by the domain to disavow every link from a whole domain, for example domain:example.com. The domain form is almost always right – a spam domain rarely links from a single page. A whole subpath, such as example.com/en/, cannot be disavowed.
• Comments begin with # and are ignored by Google. Use them to note the date and why a domain is listed.
• The format is .txt in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, at most 100,000 lines and at most 2 MB. Each URL may be at most 2,048 characters.
• The property type matters: the tool is not supported for Domain properties in Search Console. Google gives no instruction on what someone with only a Domain property should do; the practical route is to add a URL-prefix property for the same website.

A new upload replaces the previous list for the property. If you want to add domains, you add them to the existing file and upload the whole file again. According to Google it takes a few weeks before the disavowal takes effect, because Google needs to recrawl the links.

Risks and common mistakes

The most common mistake is to disavow links that carried rankings, often because a tool said they were dangerous. Link tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush show scores for how "toxic" a link is, but the score is the tool's own calculation and not Google's assessment. Our view is that such a score is a starting point for review, never a list to upload as it is. A link from a small industry blog with low domain authority can look weak in the tool and still be an entirely natural link that Google counts.

Other mistakes:

• Disavowing as a precaution. Without a manual action or a clear link problem there is nothing to gain, only something to lose.
• Disavowing whole domains carelessly. domain: removes every link from the domain, the good ones included.
• Believing that disavow replaces the fix. For a manual action Google wants to see that you have tried to remove the links, not just disavowed them. Keep the file and the correspondence – they are the evidence in the request for review.
• Using disavow as the explanation for an algorithmic drop. The drop is down to something else, and time passes.

What decides the value of a backlink – authority, relevance and placement – is described in the section on what makes a backlink valuable.

Alternatives to disavow

The alternatives to disavow are to ask for the link to be removed or to ignore it – and for most websites that is enough.

• Ask for removal. Contact the owner of the website where the link sits. For a manual action it is also what Google wants to see documented in the request for review. Links that cannot be removed are disavowed as a second step.
• Ignore. A handful of odd links from directory pages and scraper websites is normal for every website and needs no action.

The best protection against link problems is never to create them: no bought links, no link exchanges in volume. White hat SEO is slower, but what you build you get to keep.