When you should disavow
Rarely. Google already ignores most spammy links automatically, and recommends the disavow tool only when both of these apply:
- You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and
- they have caused a manual action, or are likely to, for example because you or a previous agency bought links or took part in link schemes.
The random spam links from scraper sites that every site picks up don’t need to be disavowed.
How to disavow links
- Export your links from the Links report in Google Search Console, or from a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush.
- Try to get the worst links removed by contacting the site owners.
- List the rest in a plain text file, one per line:
domain:spammy-example.comfor a whole domain, or a full URL for a single page. - Upload the file in Google’s Disavow links tool for your Search Console property.
Be careful
Disavowing good links can hurt your rankings, because they stop counting. Each upload replaces the previous file, so keep your whole list in one file. It can take weeks before Google has recrawled the links and applied it.