TL;DR
I used to recommend disavow files fairly readily. I almost never do now. The tool did not change. Google got better at ignoring junk on its own. There is no feedback and no measurement, so you will never know what it did. Never disavow on a toxicity score.
I used to recommend disavow files fairly readily. I almost never do now, and the change is worth explaining because the reasoning applies more widely than this one tool.
What changed
Not the tool. Google’s ability to ignore junk on its own.
The disavow file was built for a period when unnatural links could genuinely drag a site down and manual actions for link schemes were common. Both are much rarer now. Google discounts links it can see you did not build, and for most sites that happens without anybody filing anything.
So the question stopped being “should we clean this up” and became “is there anything here Google is failing to discount”. For most profiles the honest answer is no.
What the file actually does
It tells Google to ignore specific links. It is a one-way instruction with no confirmation, no report, and no way to measure the effect. You cannot A/B test it and you will never know what it did.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. If you disavow a hundred links and nothing changes, you cannot tell whether they were harmless or whether you removed something that was helping. There is no feedback.
When I would still use one
Three situations, and they are narrow.
- An active manual action for unnatural links. Unambiguous. Google has told you, in Search Console, and the file is part of the remedy. This is the case the tool was built for.
- You know you bought links. Not suspect. Know. A previous agency ran a campaign, you have the invoices or the pattern is unmistakable, and the links are still live. Removal at source is better where possible; disavowal is the fallback.
- A genuine negative SEO event. Thousands of links appearing in weeks from an obviously coordinated source. Rare, and it does look like what it is.
Outside those three, I would leave it alone.
When it does damage
Disavowing on a toxicity score. The scores are third-party inventions, not Google signals, and a file built by exporting everything above a threshold will contain links that were doing something. This is the commonest harm and it is entirely self-inflicted.
Disavowing at domain level to be thorough. One bad link on a site that also gave you a good one, disavowed as a domain, removes both.
Disavowing to feel like progress. The most honest description of most disavow work. It is visible, it produces a deliverable, and it is easier than the thing that would actually help.
The reframe
Almost every profile has junk in it. Ahrefs examined 14 billion pages and found 96.55% get zero traffic from Google. The web is overwhelmingly made of pages nobody visits, and some of them link to you. That is not a problem to solve. It is what the web is.
Google’s spam policies define link spam by intent: “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” Note the framing. Links you did not create and did not seek do not meet that definition, and treating them as a liability misreads what the policy is about.
What I would do instead
Ask whether links are the constraint at all. On most sites I audit they are not. The pages are thin, the architecture is broken, or the site is competing above its weight. Auditing the profile before the site deserves links is effort in the wrong place.
And if you did buy links, get them removed rather than disavowed. Removal is real. Disavowal is a request.
Why I am posting this rather than quietly changing the template
I have written up two other recommendations I have stopped making, and the reason is the same each time: the advice is in documents clients still have. Silently updating a template does nothing for somebody holding an audit from 2022 that tells them to build a disavow file. Saying so publicly does.
The short version
- Google got better at ignoring junk. The tool did not change; the need did.
- No feedback, no measurement. You will never know what it did.
- Use it for: an active manual action, links you know you bought, a real negative SEO event.
- Never disavow on a toxicity score. Third-party inventions, not Google signals.
- Domain-level disavowal removes the good link too.
- Junk in a profile is normal. 96.55% of pages get no traffic; some of them link to you.
- Removal beats disavowal. And links are usually not the constraint.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Link building covers the off-site half, including what not to bother with. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
