Disavowing bad links

[SenseiSteve]

What's your take on disavowing bad links? I hear so many varying opinions one way or the other. Some swear that Google penalizes sites with excessive bad links, while I've seen statements from Google that you're safe to ignore them, but those were from a couple of years ago.

 

[bigredseo]

The Disavow tool was a great creation by Google, and it helped their spam bots learn what to look for when it comes to spammy sites. These days however, the tool is rarely used by anyone. Google's AI system has gotten smart enough that it doesn't need to be shown every instance of bad links and can do a great job on it's own.

It's been 4 or 5 years since I've used the disavow tool with any earnest. Ideally, if you have enough other links coming to your site, those bad links wouldn't be a factor anwyay - every situation is different, but MOST people don't need the disavow tool, which is why it was removed from the Google Search Console (it can still be accessed, but no longer an easy link that anyone could accidentally click)

 

[Ricky]

The way to disavow backlinks is by uploading a disavow file in Google Search Console. You first need to identify which links you are going to disavow. Then create a disavow file containing the links. Login into Google Search Console and upload the file.

 

[thcservers]

We've had our own experience with the disavow tool and what John Mueller had to say about it. We've experienced a lot of negative backlinking towards our website. At first, we had no idea what was going on. We were monitoring the keywords, but not the backlinks/anchor text. When all of a sudden everything dropped. We tried searching for penalties, any core updates in google or something that might have triggered it. Nothing. This went on for around 2 months. Until we checked the actual backlinks. There were over 10k of negative backlinks indexed by google. We were ranking better for "darknet shop" than for the keywords we were previously top 5.

We disavowed the backlinks and a few weeks later all was good.
From our experience (and we can't say this is generally true), the disavow tool does have an impact on SEO. Also, google's AI isn't that effective when trying to figure out which link is SPAM and which is not.
If you're going to read about negative SEO, there are a lot of articles where it states it has no effect whatsoever because the links are being posted on websites that are not indexed. We found this to not be completely true. We experienced it ourselves. So, from time to tine, it might be good to audit your website.