Backlinks to your site are a big part of how Google ranks you. As far as Google’s concerned, the more links point your way, the more sites you have vouching for your quality.

Except some people’s word is worth more than others. Same is true for sites. And in fact, there’s some sites that you’d prefer to not be associated with, whether through links or otherwise. When you find yourself in this scenario, the link disavowal option is here to save the day.

First off — what is link disavowal?

Link disavowal, in one sentence, is how you tell Google to disassociate your site with another that’s linking to yours. Why would you want to do that? Well, if that site is “undesirable” and linking to you, it’ll drag you down with it as far as Google’s concerned.

This is because Google’s algorithm uses links to your site as a way to measure your prestige and dependability. If a high-ranking site links to yours, part of its “prestige” will get passed on to you by association. Amassing many links from trustworthy sites is great! But the opposite side of that is that being associated with shady, undesirable sites will make you seem, in Google’s view, shady and undesirable too.

This will make your search engine ranking drop, which we obviously don’t want.

Luckily, Google realized the issues here back in 2012 and created their disavow tool to combat what they call “black hat webspam.” Intuitively, this tool lets you instruct Google to ignore a specific backlink when defining your ranking. This gives you more control over the links Google uses to rank your site; you can then let through the backlinks from trustworthy sites while disavowing the ones that’ll sink your ranking. When used right, this ensures your ranking is as high as possible, all else held constant.

Reviewing backlinks and toxic link ratios in a third party management tool

More about toxic links

Like we said earlier, generally, backlinks are a good thing. They are, after all, one of the main factors Google uses to determine your page rank. That feels like one of the reasons toxic links are such a pain, since they take something that’s supposed to be good and tank your site.

These bad links come in a handful of forms. Generally, they fall under one of these categories:

• Comment or forum spam links: If you’ve ever run a blog, you’ve probably experienced these — spam comments, oftentime en masse. These are bad news. Disavow.
• Expired domain links: These links come in from “dead websites” that are just sitting there, inactive for at least six months. Obviously, they won’t transfer any value.
• Low-quality, spammy site links: This one’s a common culprit, where a spammy site that exists pretty much just to send out a bunch of outbound links, sends out links to you. Sometimes these are the result of the site being hacked. Regardless, links originating here are often good candidates to be disavowed.
• Paid links: These are backlinks that you’ve paid for to lead to your site. They’re low-quality and you’re wasting money. So, uh, don’t do that.
• Lastly, private blog network links: Here are large groupings of blogs and/or sites that are run by the same site owners to build backlinks between them. Their aim is of course to get their sites and content to rank higher — and this used to be a legitimate technique! But, like humans are known to do, bloggers using this method went overboard, got spammy with it, and they became recognized as low-quality and detrimental.

Luckily, there are services that can help you determine what constitutes a “spammy” website. MOZ, for example, offers a Spam Score diagnostic tool — anything over 60% is generally considered a high, undesirable score. SEMrush similarly has their Toxic Link Score; the 60% threshold applies for this tool too. It’s worth noting, however, that a site having a 60% or greater score doesn’t necessarily mean you should automatically disavow a link with that origin, just that it’s a candidate for disavowal — you should still look into a high-scoring site yourself and determine its quality.

View of toxic link rations over time from SEMrush

When to disavow links, and how

First off, you don’t wanna go Rambo disavowing backlinks everywhere. They are, after all, normally good for your search engine rankings — and just having a couple low-quality links pointing your way won’t tank you.

Google recommends you only disavow backlinks if A) you have a considerable number of spammy or low-quality backlinks directing to your site and B) the links have caused (or likely will cause) a manual action against your site, which is when one of Google’s human reviewers determines your site’s not meeting their webmaster quality guidelines.

Some SEO experts say you should be more proactive about disavowing toxic backlinks. The best approach is up to you. When done right, you can fine-tune your site performance to rank as highly as possible; when used incorrectly, though, overzealously disavowing links can harm your site’s Google performance.

Accordingly, we recommend you only disavow backlinks if you decide there are enough spammy or low-quality links pointing to your site where you’re confident they’ve cumulatively become an issue.

Now, when you’ve determined there’s enough toxic backlinks to be harming your site, you have to actually do the disavowing. Luckily, it’s not too hard: compile the links you want to disavow, and upload that list as a .txt file directly to Google Search Console via their disavow tool. (SEMrush, MOZ, or other programs have tools that can make this process easier, if you’d like help.) Google themselves offers a more detailed breakdown on this process here, which we recommend if you’ve never disavowed links before.

Disavowing links is similar to many aspects of maintaining a strong online presence for your business; it mostly comes down to being vigilant and deliberate. If you pay attention to the backlinks directing to your site, you should catch them before they sink your search engine ranking. And once you decide to take action against them, being surgical and thorough in your approach puts you in a good position to take care of it. So in other words, it might be new, but this is nothing you’ve never done before.