Disavow Definition in SEO | Why & How to Disavow

What is Disavow in SEO?

In SEO, “disavow” means telling Google to ignore certain backlinks pointing to your website.

The targets of disavowing are usually low-quality or spammy backlinks that could hurt your rankings instead of helping them. 

Typically, your website gets them from questionable link-building schemes that violate Google’s link spam policies. Sometimes, a competitor might perform negative SEO attacks and direct spammy links to your website in an attempt to pull your search engine positioning.

While Google is smart at identifying poor links on its own, the disavow feature gives you more control over your backlink profile, protecting your site from potential penalties.

Why Should You Disavow Backlinks? (5 Reasons)

Google says disavowing backlinks must be used cautiously and as a last resort when all other options have been exhausted. If you can remove the backlinks yourself or ask the linking site to take them down, do that first.

But what are the specific reasons for disavowing backlinks? Here are 5 reasons:

Reason #1: Disavow spammy backlinks to recover from a manual action

Manual actions happen when human reviewers determine a website violates Google’s spam policies—spammy backlinks fall into this category. 

If you receive a manual action, you can see the affected pages and the penalty’s cause in your Google Search Console.

When this happens, you will need to use Google’s disavow links tool page to have them removed.

Reason #2: Use the disavow feature if your site suffers from an algorithmic penalty

Although not quite as horrific as the manual penalty, an algorithmic penalty can still deliver a knockout blow to any website. 

If you have experienced a traffic drop due to an algorithmic change, there is a good chance that toxic backlinks are to blame. 

GSC’s disavow feature might help you recover.

Reason #3: To recover from past SEO mistakes

If you’ve previously purchased links or hired an SEO who practiced black-hat tactics, your site is likely to have spammy backlinks. 

Conversely, if you just bought a new website and the last owner practiced unscrupulous link-building schemes, having toxic backlinks is possible.

Disavowing lets you clean up your backlink profile and rebuild trust with search engines.

Reason #4: To undo negative SEO attacks from competitors

Competitors or malicious actors may create harmful backlinks to sabotage your rankings.

While there isn’t any direct way to know the competitors who perpetrated the negative SEO attack, disavowing helps neutralize their impact.

Reason #5: General maintenance and clean-up of link profile quality

While Google recommends using the disavow tool as a last resort, there isn’t any penalty against using it occasionally during a backlink audit.

Toxic backlinks from irrelevant websites with high Spam Scores might accumulate under your nose. Spam Score is an indicator that says how many low-quality and dead links a website is hosting. If it’s above, consider disavowing them.

By auditing and cleaning up your backlink profile, you inadvertently prevent spammy backlinks from blowing out of proportion, becoming manual actions.

What Backlinks You Should Disavow?

There are a few things you should check to decide if you should disavow the backlink:

1. Backlinks that are hidden, typically those that use white spaces as anchor texts.There are few things you should check to decide if you should disavow the backlink:
2. Backlinks from websites with a high Spam Score. Spam Score is a metric developed by Moz that uses 27 signals to see if a link is spammy. Anything under 30% is generally considered safe.
3. Backlinks that use unrelated anchor texts or spam exact-match anchors
4. Backlinks coming from websites with low Domain Authority scores
5. Backlinks from irrelevant industries, unrelated niches, and/or in foreign languages

How to Disavow Backlinks? (2 Ways)

Solution #1: Use Google Search Console

Google has a built-in disavow feature where you can manually submit links you wish to disavow. Here’s how to do it:

First, prepare a text file and list the URLs you want to disavow. If you wish to disavow an entire domain, prefix it with “domain:” before writing the domain name. 

Keep each line within 2,048 characters and the maximum number of lines equal to or under 100,000, equivalent to 2 MBs. 

You may also add comments on the text file by placing a # symbol. Google will ignore lines that begin with #.

Next, visit the disavow links tool page and upload your file.

Select the correct property to prevent disavowing similar backlinks on a non-targeted property. If the property already has an existing disavow list, the new upload will replace the existing file. 

However, if you do not include the previously disavowed links on the new file, Google will no longer consider the old backlinks disavowed. 

Once Google accepts the list, removing the backlinks will take several weeks, as Googlebot will have to recrawl and process the pages again.

Solution #2: Use Linkody

Linkody comes with a built-in disavow tool that lets you identify and select links or domains to be disavowed. But like Google, disavowing links on Linkody does not automatically disavow them with Google, as it will take some time.

If you already have a Linkody account, simply log in and select your targeted domain.

If you haven’t yet, sign up for a 30-day FREE trial and enjoy Linkody’s backlinks monitoring capabilities. 

Once you select the target domain, choose Links from the header menu. This will list all of the backlinks pointing to your website, along with essential metrics to help you decide if a link is worth keeping or disavowing, which includes:

• Date the backlink was discovered
• Status of the backlink (whether 403, 404, 522, site unreachable, noindex, etc.) 
• Source URL where the backlink originates
• Target landing page on your site
• Anchor text used
• Google index status
• The “rel” attribute
• Moz DA
• Spam Score
• Google ranking
• IP address of the backlink’s hosting service provider
• TLD or top-level domain
• External follow links found on the page

Hover the mouse toward the end of the link row and click the gear icon. You can choose between the “Disavow Link” or “Disavow Domain” option.

Use the Disavow Domain option if there are many links from the same domain and the domain seems spammy and harmful. In most cases, we would advise disavowing the whole domain. When disavowed, a general prohibition icon will appear to the right:

Next, click on Disavow on your main Linkody header. On the next screen, you can see all the disavow rules you have created:

Review your rules, then use the “EXPORT” button to download your file, and upload it on Google’s disavow links tool page:

You can add a Comment for your own reference (Google does not read your comments) about why this website or link has been disavowed:

You can still view all Google disavow links and/or domains from the links view:

Make Sure to Disavow Links Responsibly

The disavow definition in SEO means to disqualify any incoming link to your site and let Google know the link has nothing to do with you. So, if it’s a spam link or a link that can get you penalized, disavowing will help ensure your site is not at fault.

So to sum up:

• Monitor your backlinks with Linkody
• Check the provided metrics to see if they qualify for disavowal (particularly the status, spam score, anchor text used, and indexing status)
• If backlinks are deemed toxic or spammy, disavow them from the Links tab
• Export your disavow rules and upload them to Google Search Console 

I hope you now know the disavow definition in SEO.

Visit our other SEO FAQs if you wish to learn more concepts about SEO.