Toxic backlinks and disavowing links: when do you need it?
Do bad links hurt your site? What Google says about the disavow tool, when to actually use it, and how to review your links calmly before you act.
What people mean by toxic backlinks
Some SEO tools label as “toxic” the links that look artificial: spam sites in languages unrelated to your audience, pages full of links, and odd anchor text that has nothing to do with your site. Some tools show a “toxicity score” that can be alarming.
But these scores are the tools’ own estimates, not a verdict from Google. Almost every known site picks up links from poor sites it never asked for; that is a normal part of the web and no reason to panic.
What Google says
Google’s page on the disavow tool says that in most cases Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use the tool. In its December 2022 link spam update, it announced that SpamBrain neutralises unnatural links.
It also describes the tool as an advanced feature to be used with caution, because using it incorrectly can harm your site’s performance in search results. Disavowing healthy links at random can do more damage than the poor links themselves.
When you actually need the disavow tool
Google sets two conditions together: you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and those links have caused a manual action on your site, or likely will.
In practice this mostly happens to sites that once bought bulk link campaigns, or worked with someone who built them links from site networks. One odd link, or ten from unknown sites, is no reason to use the tool.
How to know if your site has a manual action
Open Search Console and go to the Manual actions report. If Google has detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive or manipulative links pointing to your site, you will see it there with an explanation; if there is nothing, you will see a green check mark and a message saying so.
A drop in traffic alone does not mean a penalty: it may come from a ranking update, a competitor improving their pages, a technical problem or a seasonal change in demand. Find the real cause before blaming links, starting with the page itself in the SEO audit.
Review your links calmly
The Links report in Search Console shows the sites that link to you most, your pages with the most links, and the most used link text. Start there, and make sure your most important links come from real sites in your field.
If you find links you once bought on poor sites, the first step is to ask those sites’ owners to remove them or mark them nofollow or sponsored. Disavowing comes after that, and only for links you could not remove that meet Google’s conditions.
What a disavow file looks like
A plain .txt file encoded in UTF-8, with one page URL or one whole domain per line, a domain prefixed with domain:, as in domain:spam-example.com. Lines starting with # are comments that Google ignores. The limit is 100,000 lines and 2 MB.
You upload it in the disavow tool in Search Console for the property concerned, and each property has one list: uploading a new list replaces the old one entirely. So keep a copy of the file with the reason each domain was added, then edit and re-upload it when needed.
Prevention is easier than cure
Don’t buy links in bulk, and don’t deal with anyone promising thousands of links within days. Choose real sites with an audience, know each link’s type before paying, and log what you get so you know where every link came from if you ever need to review them. Types of backlinks helps you tell the safe from the risky.
If you are a publisher, don’t turn your site into a home for links that have nothing to do with your readers; a clean site stays attractive to buyers for the long term. See Linkaza’s quality standards for what we expect from listed sites.
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