30-second summary:
- In early November, Google made a UI update to its Disavow Links tool.
- The core functionality hasn’t changed, meaning that some SEO practitioners will continue to use it incorrectly.
- Disavow continues to have no impact on fixing negative SEO and often won’t make your website do better in search.
- However, it can reduce the chances of being served with manual actions as a result of your backlink profile.
Once upon a time, Google’s Disavow Links tool seemed like a godsend to SEO practitioners everywhere. Hailed on its launch in 2012 — not long after the Penguin algorithm update — as the search engine’s “best spam reporting tool yet”, disavow links allowed webmasters to instruct Google to ignore all links from certain domains.
Flash forward eight years and the feature, which has seen its fair share of controversy, has been incorporated into Google’s updated Search Console. In the words of Google analyst John Mueller,
“the core functionality has not changed…it’s a UI update.”
However, the revised Disavow tool does include some new features, such as the ability to download your disavowed links as a .txt file, as well as improved support.
The response from SEO practitioners has been somewhat tepid, whether because it won’t change the way the tool has been misused to this point, or simply because there are other, more pressing matters Google could have attended to first. Here, we’ll go through the pros and cons of Google’s Disavow Links tool, and whether these new changes that have been made are worth it.
How webmasters were using the Disavow Links tool wrong
Coming as it did in the wake of the Penguin update, many people saw disavowal as an easy way to remove spammy backlinks from their site’s