Google Disavow Tool: when it makes sense and when it doesn’t
What the Disavow Tool does, what cases justify it and why premature devaluation can be risky.
The topic is especially important when rankings, trust or the evaluation of external signals are unclear. In practice, it is almost always worth looking at quality, context and risks instead of pure quantity values.
What the Disavow Tool does, what cases justify it and why premature devaluation can be risky. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
The Disavow Tool is only useful for special cases, such as clear spam links or manual measures. For normal weak links, it is often not necessary.
Example: An export contains many unknown links
A backlink tool marks hundreds of foreign-language domains. This alone is not a sufficient reason for a disavow upload. Distinguish automatically created spam links from your own manipulative link activities and check whether there is a manual measure or a correspondingly justified risk.
Google describes the tool as an exception for significant artificial link problems, not as a regular cleanup of every eye-catching score. Inappropriate exclusions can hurt. Document the specific justification for each domain and possible removal steps before submitting a file.
Background
There are always inferior links on websites. This is done either through the own fault of the webmaster, who exaggerated it in its optimization, or through completely foreign activities. Their motivation can sometimes not be explained, but sometimes already (see below). With the Google Disavow tool, the webmaster now declares these links invalid vis-à-vis the Google crawlers in order to be able to downrank or even have a serious Penalty be avoided.
Such tools now offer almost all search engine operators. Toxic links have always existed, but before 2012 they were often (not exclusively) from the webmasters themselves, who diligently operated OffPage SEO and either bought backlinks en masse or sent them to their own site from their own blogs.
Google’s Peguin update thoroughly cleaned up this practice in 2012, penalizing pages that use methods of Black hat SEO had been optimized. This is no longer used by a reasonable webmaster. Toxic links still exist. They sometimes come without any apparent motivation, for example, from Russian websites, but sometimes also from serious competitors of their own industry, which is thus a kind of subversive Black hat SEO against competitors in order to make them Google penalty suspended.
If such a Penalty In fact, the website is hard to recover from, which is why webmasters must observe such processes and, if necessary, use the Google Disavow tool to eliminate such toxic links. You can see those links in the Google Search Console. This shows all backlinks to your own page. The webmaster is now required to identify those links that could harm him under certain circumstances.
The Search Console also points to webmaster policy violations, including linkspam, which makes it easier to search for toxic links. But it's not always that simple. In some cases, the webmaster really has to look at the website from which a mysterious backlink originates and decide with common sense whether this backlink could harm him.
Since when does the Google Disavow tool exist?
Google released the Disavow tool in October 2012 following the Penguin update. Since then, webmasters can use this tool to mark an unwanted backlink like a nofollow link, i.e. a link that the crawler should not follow. From the point of view of Googlebots If it is then a link that is not relevant for SEO, it can neither influence the ranking nor be identified as spam.
By the way, toxic links sometimes arise accidentally, they come from sitebars, footers or an excessive link exchange. Also links in widgets and forum posts with optimized anchor texts, the Googlebots now consider toxic. Therefore, webmasters should actively use the Disavow tool for the maintenance of their website.