Toxic backlinks almost killed a client’s site last year. They went from 45,000 organic visits per month to under 8,000 in six weeks. The cause? About 12,000 spammy links from Chinese gambling sites that someone pointed at their domain. I’ve used Google’s Disavow Tool on over 60 client sites since 2012, and I can tell you this: it works, but only if you use it correctly.

Most people either ignore toxic backlinks until Google slaps them with a manual penalty, or they panic and disavow everything that looks slightly suspicious. Both approaches are wrong. The Disavow Tool is a precision instrument, not a sledgehammer. In this guide, I’ll walk you through exactly how I identify toxic links, build the disavow file, and submit it to Google. I’ll also share real numbers from client recoveries so you can see what actually happens after you hit submit.

What Is Google’s Disavow Tool?

Google’s Disavow Tool lets you tell Google to ignore specific backlinks when evaluating your site. Think of it as saying, “Hey Google, I know these links exist, but I didn’t ask for them and I don’t want them counting toward my site’s ranking.” Google then factors this into their algorithm the next time they crawl and reindex those pages.

You’ll find the tool at [Google Search Console’s Disavow Links page](https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links). It’s deliberately buried. Google doesn’t want casual users stumbling onto it and doing damage. You need to select your property first, then upload a plain text file with the links or domains you want disavowed.

How Google Processes Disavow Files

Google doesn’t instantly remove the links from your profile. The disavow file acts as a strong suggestion. Google’s crawlers need to recrawl the pages containing those links, and then the algorithm incorporates your disavow request during the next index update. In my experience, you’ll start seeing movement within 2 to 4 weeks for most links. Some stubborn ones take 6 to 8 weeks. I had one client where a batch of links from a massive spam network took almost 3 months to fully process.

The important thing to understand is that disavowing doesn’t remove the links from your backlink profile in Search Console or third-party tools. They’ll still show up in Ahrefs and Semrush. Google simply stops counting them as ranking signals, positive or negative.

When Should You Disavow Backlinks?

Before you touch the Disavow Tool, you need to be sure it’s the right move. I’ve seen people disavow links that were actually helping their rankings. That’s a painful mistake to undo. Here are the situations where disavowing makes sense.

Manual Penalty From Google

This is the most clear-cut reason to disavow. If you’ve received a manual action notice in Google Search Console for “unnatural links pointing to your site,” you need to clean up your backlink profile. Google is explicitly telling you there’s a problem. I’ve handled 23 manual penalty recoveries over the past 5 years, and every single one required a disavow file as part of the reconsideration request.

The process here is straightforward. Remove what you can by contacting webmasters directly. Disavow everything you can’t get removed. Then submit a reconsideration request explaining what you did. I typically get penalties lifted within 2 to 3 weeks of submitting the request, assuming the cleanup was thorough.

Negative SEO Attacks

Negative SEO is when someone deliberately builds spammy links to your site to trigger a penalty. It’s less common than people think, but it absolutely happens. I saw a surge in negative SEO attacks in 2024 and 2025, particularly targeting small businesses in competitive niches like personal injury law and payday loans.

Signs of a negative SEO attack include a sudden spike in backlinks from irrelevant foreign-language sites, links with over-optimized anchor text you didn’t build, and hundreds of links appearing from the same IP range overnight. If you spot this pattern, don’t wait. Start building your disavow file immediately.

Cleanup After Bad Link Building

Maybe you hired a cheap SEO agency 5 years ago that built thousands of directory links, blog comment spam, or PBN links. Those tactics used to work. They don’t anymore. If those old links are dragging down your profile, disavowing them can help. I had a client in 2024 who was still carrying 4,200 PBN links from an agency they fired in 2019. After disavowing those links, their organic traffic increased by 34% over 3 months.

When NOT to Disavow

Here’s where I get opinionated. Don’t disavow links just because a tool flags them as “toxic.” Ahrefs and Semrush use their own algorithms to estimate toxicity, and they’re wrong more often than you’d think. I’ve tested this extensively. In one case, Semrush flagged 2,300 links as toxic for a client. When I manually reviewed them, only about 380 were actually problematic. The rest were legitimate links from small blogs, forum discussions, and niche directories.

Don’t disavow links from sites that simply have low Domain Authority. A DA of 5 doesn’t mean the link is harmful. It might just be a new or small site. Don’t disavow links you built yourself through legitimate outreach. And definitely don’t disavow links from your own properties, social profiles, or business listings. I’ve seen people accidentally disavow their own brand mentions and wonder why their rankings dropped.

How to Identify Toxic Backlinks

Finding the bad links is the hardest part of this entire process. It requires judgment, not just running a report. I use a three-step system that’s worked consistently across hundreds of client audits.

Step 1: Pull Your Full Backlink Profile

Start with Google Search Console’s Links report. Export everything. Then cross-reference with Ahrefs or Semrush. I prefer Ahrefs for backlink analysis because their index is larger and updates more frequently. Export all referring domains and sort by the number of links each domain sends you.

Red flags to look for at this stage: domains sending you hundreds of links (unless it’s a legitimate site like Reddit or Wikipedia), domains in languages completely unrelated to your business, and domains with very high outbound link counts. If a site links to 50,000 other sites, that’s not editorial. That’s spam.

Step 2: Use Toxic Link Reports as a Starting Point

Run the Semrush Backlink Audit or Ahrefs’ link analysis. These tools flag potentially harmful links based on factors like spam patterns, link networks, and site quality signals. But treat these flags as suggestions, not verdicts. I always manually review every flagged domain before adding it to a disavow file.

My manual review checklist is simple. Visit the site. Does it look like a real website with real content? Is there any editorial reason for the link to exist? Is the site in the same language and industry as my client? If the answer to all three is “no,” it goes on the disavow list. If there’s any doubt, I leave it alone. You can always add more links to your disavow file later. You can’t easily undo a bad disavow.

Step 3: Look for Patterns

Toxic backlinks rarely come one at a time. They come in clusters. Once you identify a spam network, you can often disavow at the domain level and catch hundreds of bad links with a single line in your disavow file. I look for patterns like shared IP addresses, similar site templates, identical content across multiple domains, and links that all appeared on the same date.

For one client in the finance niche, I found 340 domains all running the same WordPress theme, all hosted on the same /24 IP range, and all linking to my client with the same anchor text. That’s a link network. I disavowed all 340 domains in one batch, and it accounted for over 6,000 individual links.

Creating a Disavow File

The disavow file is a plain text file (.txt) with a specific format. Get this wrong and Google will reject your submission. I’ve seen people waste weeks because they saved the file as .csv or used the wrong syntax.

File Format Requirements

Your disavow file must be a plain text file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII. The file extension must be .txt. Each line contains either a URL to disavow or a domain to disavow. Comments start with a hash symbol (#). That’s it. No headers, no columns, no fancy formatting.

Domain-Level vs URL-Level Disavow

You have two options for each entry. You can disavow a specific URL, or you can disavow an entire domain. I use domain-level disavow about 90% of the time. If a domain is spammy, all its links are spammy. There’s no point disavowing individual pages when the whole site is garbage.

URL-level disavow looks like this:

`https://spammysite.com/page-with-bad-link.html`

Domain-level disavow looks like this:

`domain:spammysite.com`

The `domain:` prefix is important. Without it, Google treats the line as a URL, and it won’t match subdomains or other pages on that domain.

Example Disavow File

Here’s what a real disavow file looks like. I’ve simplified it from an actual client file:

“`

Disavow file for example.com

Last updated: January 2026

Spam network – Chinese gambling sites

domain:spamsite1.cn

domain:spamsite2.cn

domain:spamsite3.cn

PBN links from old SEO agency

domain:cheapblognetwork1.com

domain:cheapblognetwork2.com

domain:cheapblognetwork3.com

Individual spam pages on otherwise okay sites

https://decent-forum.com/spam-thread-12345

https://another-site.com/hacked-page-with-links

“`

I always add comments explaining why each group of links is being disavowed. This helps when you revisit the file months later, and it’s useful if you need to submit a reconsideration request to Google. Showing Google that you’ve done careful, documented work makes a difference.

Keeping Your File Organized

For clients with large disavow files, I organize entries into sections with clear comments. One section for spam networks, one for PBN links, one for hacked sites, one for negative SEO sources. My largest disavow file has over 4,800 domain entries for a client in the gambling industry. Without comments and organization, maintaining that file would be impossible.

Submitting the Disavow File

The submission process is simple, but there are a few things that trip people up. Let me walk you through it step by step.

Step-by-Step Submission

First, go to the [Google Disavow Tool page](https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links). Select the property you want to submit for. If you have both http and https versions, or www and non-www, make sure you’re submitting under the correct property. I recommend using the domain-level property if you have one set up in Search Console.

Click “Upload Disavow List” and select your .txt file. Google will show you a summary: how many domains and URLs are in your file. Review this carefully. If the numbers look wrong, your file might have formatting issues. Click “Submit” and you’re done.

Updating an Existing Disavow File

This is where people make the most common mistake. When you upload a new disavow file, it completely replaces the old one. It doesn’t add to it. So if you uploaded 500 domains last month and now want to add 50 more, you need to upload a file with all 550 domains. If you just upload the 50 new ones, you’ve effectively un-disavowed the original 500.

I keep a master disavow file for every client and add to it over time. Before every upload, I download the existing file from Search Console, merge it with new entries, and upload the combined file. This simple practice has saved me from accidentally undoing months of cleanup work.

Timeline for Processing

Google doesn’t give you a confirmation that links have been disavowed. There’s no status bar or progress indicator. Based on my experience across dozens of submissions, here’s what to expect. Small files with under 100 domains typically get processed within 2 to 3 weeks. Medium files with 100 to 1,000 domains take 3 to 6 weeks. Large files with over 1,000 domains can take 2 to 3 months for full processing.

You’ll know it’s working when you see changes in your rankings for keywords that were affected by the toxic links. Sometimes the improvement is dramatic. I had a client recover 12 ranking positions for their primary keyword within 3 weeks of submitting a disavow file. Other times it’s gradual, with small improvements over several months.

Common Disavow Mistakes

I’ve audited disavow files from other agencies and in-house SEO teams. The mistakes I see are consistent and avoidable. Here are the ones that cause the most damage.

Disavowing Good Links

This is the number one mistake. People run a toxic link report, see a bunch of red flags, and disavow everything without checking. I inherited a client in 2025 who had previously hired an agency that disavowed over 3,000 domains. When I reviewed the file, about 40% of those domains were sending legitimate, helpful links. Guest post placements, news mentions, industry directories. Real links that were contributing to rankings.

The fix took months. I rebuilt the disavow file from scratch, removing the legitimate domains. Then I had to wait for Google to reprocess everything. The client’s traffic increased by 28% just from un-disavowing those good links. That’s how much damage over-disavowing can do.

Not Trying Link Removal First

Google explicitly says you should try to remove bad links before disavowing them. For manual penalty reconsideration requests, this isn’t optional. You need to show evidence that you attempted outreach. I send removal request emails to webmasters before adding any link to a disavow file. The success rate is low, maybe 10 to 15% of webmasters actually remove links. But that documentation matters when Google reviews your reconsideration request.

I use a simple email template that explains the situation, identifies the specific page with the link, and asks for removal. I follow up once after 7 days. If there’s no response after the second email, the domain goes into the disavow file. I keep records of every email sent, including timestamps and bounce notifications.

Submitting the Wrong File Format

I’ve seen people submit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, and even PDFs. Google accepts only .txt files. I’ve also seen files that were technically .txt but used the wrong encoding. If you’re on Windows, make sure you’re saving as UTF-8, not ANSI or some other format. On Mac, the default TextEdit plain text format works fine.

Another common format error is adding the protocol to domain-level entries. `domain:https://spamsite.com` is wrong. It should be `domain:spamsite.com` without the protocol. This mistake means Google ignores those entries silently. No error message. Your disavow just doesn’t work.

Over-Disavowing

Some people take a “better safe than sorry” approach and disavow thousands of domains based on low spam scores. This is risky. Every disavowed link is a link that can’t help your rankings. If you disavow 5,000 domains and 2,000 of them were actually neutral or slightly positive, you’ve just told Google to ignore a significant chunk of your link equity.

My rule: if you’re not at least 80% sure a link is harmful, leave it alone. Google’s algorithm is pretty good at ignoring low-quality links on its own. The disavow tool is for the links that are actively hurting you, not for links that just look ugly.

Does Disavowing Actually Work in 2026?

This is the question I get most often. And the honest answer is: yes, but with caveats.

What Google Says

Google has been inconsistent on this topic. John Mueller has said the disavow tool is useful for specific situations, particularly manual penalties. But Google has also suggested that their algorithms are getting better at automatically identifying and ignoring spam links. Gary Illyes said in 2024 that most sites don’t need to use the disavow tool at all.

I think Google’s messaging is aimed at preventing people from using the tool unnecessarily. For sites that have never engaged in shady link building and haven’t been hit by negative SEO, they’re probably right. But for sites with actual toxic link problems, the disavow tool still moves the needle.

Real Results From Client Sites

Here’s data from three client recoveries in 2025 and early 2026.

**Client A (E-commerce, home furnishings):** Hit by negative SEO attack. 8,400 spam links appeared over 2 weeks. After disavowing 1,200 domains, organic traffic recovered from 12,000 to 41,000 monthly visits within 6 weeks. That’s a 241% increase.

**Client B (SaaS company):** Manual penalty for unnatural links from a previous agency’s PBN strategy. Disavowed 890 PBN domains and removed 120 links through outreach. Penalty lifted in 18 days. Rankings returned to pre-penalty levels within 5 weeks.

**Client C (Local services):** Gradual decline over 12 months. Backlink audit revealed 3,400 directory spam links accumulated over several years. After disavowing and waiting 8 weeks, organic traffic increased by 34% and their primary keyword moved from position 14 to position 6.

Alternatives and Complementary Strategies

Disavowing isn’t the only option. For negative SEO attacks, you can also strengthen your overall link profile by building high-quality links that dilute the toxic ones. I call this the “drown out the noise” strategy, and I use it alongside disavowing for most clients.

If you’ve received a manual penalty, you absolutely need to disavow. There’s no alternative. But for algorithmic suppression from bad links, you have more flexibility. Sometimes building 20 to 30 strong links from authoritative sites in your niche does more good than disavowing 500 weak ones. I usually recommend doing both.

Google’s own algorithm improvements over the past few years have reduced the impact of spam links. The March 2024 core update and subsequent spam updates have made Google better at ignoring low-quality links automatically. But “better” doesn’t mean “perfect.” I’ve seen cases in 2026 where clearly spammy links were still dragging down rankings until we disavowed them.

Your Next Step

Don’t start with the Disavow Tool. Start with an audit. Pull your backlink profile from Google Search Console and cross-reference it with Ahrefs or Semrush. Look for the patterns I described above. Clusters of spam. Link networks. Sudden spikes from irrelevant sites. If you find problems, follow the process: document everything, attempt removal, then disavow what you can’t get removed.

If you’re dealing with a manual penalty, move fast. Every day with an active penalty is lost traffic and lost revenue. If it’s just suspicious-looking links without a penalty, take your time. Do the manual review. Don’t let a panic-driven disavow cause more harm than the links themselves.

I’ve been cleaning up backlink profiles for over a decade. The sites that recover fastest are the ones where the disavow file was built carefully, with documentation, and submitted as part of a broader cleanup strategy. The sites that struggle are the ones where someone exported a toxic link report, dumped it into a file, and uploaded it without thinking.

Frequently Asked Questions

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