Does Google's Disavow-Tool still work - or does it hurt?

[Chris Hüneke]

Back in the days Google's Disavow Tool could be useful to disavow spammy backlinks, which competitors created to hurt the rankings of a website.

Negative SEO and Spamlink-attacks were (and are) real and can cause serious damages to businesses relying on Google's Organic Search as a Traffic Source.

Of course, also Spammers and Blackhat-SEO's made heavy use of this tool to simply "recover" their sites from penalties, they have caused themselves, when buying toxic backlinks.

My theory is, that the Disavow-Tool was/is used by Blackhats way more frequently than by Whitehat SEOs. And Google therefore might have slightly changed the function of it.

For example, many Backlinksellers advertise like this to calm their potential clients: "In case of consequences, there's Google's Disavow tool, so no worries".

I directly confronted John Muller (Search Advocate at Google) with this - you can see his response in the attached image. He obviously dodged my question, but sometimes no answer can be an answer too, right?

There's an very interesting case study on Reddit on this and i have a lot more info, which i will try to put into an article on DaniWeb this weekend.

I have found a lot of answers for many questions, but on still remains...

Does the Disavow Tool still help to recover a website's lost rankings caused by spammy links?

Or does it nowadays hurt the rankings of a site even more, because Google lets it as kind of a "honeypot" for Blackhatters, which try to recover from the penalties they caused themselves?

If anybody has something to share about this, would be very appreciated.

Thanks for your attention,
Chris

[IM Tools]

As of today (2/2/25) the tool is up and running but in Barry Schwartz's May 2024 article he quotes John Mueller as saying "at some point I'm sure we'll remove it".
According to Google, they no longer penalize for bad links, they just ignore them. I tried to post the link to Barry's full article, but the Daniweb spam bot wouldn't let me.

[adilhassan]

There's a lot of debate around the Disavow Tool’s effectiveness today. While it was once crucial for dealing with toxic backlinks, Google has gotten much better at ignoring spammy links on its own. If a site isn’t under a manual penalty, disavowing might not have much impact or could even remove potentially beneficial links. It’s still useful in specific cases, but for most sites, focusing on quality content and natural link-building is a better approach. Would love to see that article when it’s out!

[Rabia_10]

The Disavow Tool is still effective for now, but I have a feeling Google might phase it out soon. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next!

[Dani]

Google has said that they plan to remove the tool because it's consistently done more harm than good for the majority of sites that have used it.

[Martin12]

yes it still works , i used it few days ago to remove some spammy links on my website

[Dani]

If you used it only a few days ago, how do you know it works? Did you see your Google traffic increase so quickly after that?

[ashleydent4u]

The Disavow Tool was definitely a double-edged sword—while it helped with cleaning up spammy backlinks, it also opened the door for misuse by blackhat SEOs looking to undo penalties. As for whether it still helps today, it seems like Google’s evolved and might not rely on it as much for ranking recovery. They’re likely using more advanced algorithms to spot and handle toxic links without needing to rely on disavowal. It could also be that using the tool in some cases might raise a red flag, suggesting you're trying to recover from bad SEO practices. If you can prove the links are hurting your site, it might help, but I think it’s become a bit trickier.

[JamieHenryBrown]

Not worth using it unless absolutely neccessary.