Should You Disavow Links?

Someone asked me the other day if I could help disavow some links to their websites. When I asked them why, they said they’d been told it was good for their backlink profile and domain authority and that it would ultimately help them get more traffic

My simple answer to all this was

“I wouldn’t bother. Disavowing links is not worth anyone’s time and effort.”

We then discussed a few points and I agreed to focus my time, effort, and skills into pursuing more productive SEO tasks for them, like on-page and technical SEO, fixing their XML sitemaps, and mending broken links in their website – these were much more worthy and effective tasks, likely to help their crawlability, ranking, and relevance.

What is Disavowing?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word disavow is:

disavow
/?d?s??va?/
verb

deny any responsibility or support for.

“the union leaders resisted pressure to disavow picket-line violence”

In search engine optimisation parlance, disavowing is the process of telling search engines, particularly Google, that you don’t want certain backlinks to your website to be taken into account when the search engines crawl and rank your website.

Why Should People Disavow Links?

There are a few reasons why webmasters and website managers should disavow links:

• Manual Actions: These are flags from Google that show up in Google Search Console, for unnatural inbound links to your website. If you’ve been engaging in link schemes such as buying or selling links, then that goes against Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) and this is their way of penalising you. They disregard the links but you also have to acknowledge this by disavowing links yourself.
• Preventative Action: If you’ve previously been involved in link-building schemes but have not yet received a manual action, then you could proactively work to acknowledge bad links by disavowing them before you get penalised
• Negative SEO: There is a dark side to the web where in the past unscrupulous actors have attempted to harm websites by building large numbers of spammy, low-quality links. Disavowing these links could mitigate their potential negative impact.

So these are the historical reasons why people should disavow links. Remember, I said that I thought it was a waste of time.

How Do You Disavow Links?

Well, if you were to disavow links, you would first gather all the link data for your website. You can get backlink data from Search Console, but also SEMrush, which I’ve used both, and also Ahrefs and Moz apparently.

Next, you’d have to analyse the links to see if you can identity any problematic links. In the past, and yes, I have occasionally disavowed links, I’d look for::

• Known spam websites or “link farms”
• Low-quality directories
• Private blog networks (PBNs)
• Websites that have irrelevant content
• Any sites with unusual or unnatural anchor text

I’ve seen all these types of these very same sites while investigating backlink profiles, and I have some stories –  like the local SEO who was charging £300 a month to someone for a backlink on a page full of backlinks which were all useless and spammy (Typical link farm). Or the private blog networks where people have built poor quality logs on subjects they know nothing about just so that they have websites in their portfolio that they can provide links from in paid link schemes. I could go on..

But anyway, you then have to create a disavow file, a plain text .txt file of all the links you want to disavow, then upload it to the Disavow Links Tool in Google Search Console.

The historical advice has always been to use the disavow tool with caution and strategically, primarily with manual actions, of which I have never had one, or in case of unnatural link building, again with which I’ve personally and professionally never been involved with.

The thing is, as I’ve said, this process is all a bit of a moot point.

Why Is it No Longer Worth Disavowing Links?

For quite some time now there has been lots of talk in the SEO world about whether we should bother to disavow links, whether disavowing really works, and if its worth the time and the effort.

I’ve disavowed links a few times in the past to test if I could make a positive difference to some clients’ websites. I made absolutely sure that I was quick and accurate and didn’t charge the clients, as this was purely for my own experimentation and testing.

The results? I didn’t notice any difference. So I never bothered again.

Bing Webmaster Tools, the Microsoft equivalent of GSC, removed their own disavow tool back in September 2023. In May 2024 Google’s Senior Search Analyst and Search Relations team lead, John Mueller, said on Twitter:

“At some point, I’m sure we’ll remove it,”

And yet here we are  on Saturday 26th April 2025 and the disavow tool is still in GSC.

Going back to John Mueller, he’s even been quoted as saying that “toxic links” have been created by owners of disavow tools to encourage their use. Disavowing links, in his opinion, is often unnecessary and “a billable waste of time”.

So I won’t disavow links and in my travels I’ve seen Google’s web spam team drop their counts of web spam because they are, quite frankly, astronomical. Google used to publicly state that they would find billions of spam web links every day, but I suspect it has become so bad that it’s not worth worrying the world by stating the exact amount of spam generated and detected every day.

Besides, SpamBrain is a Google system which has been integrated into their algorithms, and as we know, the algos and core updates often work to deal with spam links.

So no, don’t bother disavowing links and whatever you do don’t pay anyone else to do it – it’s a waste of your time, their time, and your money.

Better Spend SEO Effort Elsewhere

I personally like to conduct SEO audits first to really see where the issues are with your website. Then I look at the technical SEO; these alone can help Google and other search engines to better crawl, index, and rank your website. On-page SEO is next with a look at the local SEO, plus ecommerce if that’s what your website is about.

All this can be done on a project basis, or you can secure my services in an SEO retainer.

Should you disavow links? Probably not worth your time. Instead, call me on 01252 692 765 to see what else we can do for your website.