When you need a disavow file
Most sites don’t. Google’s Disavow links to your site page says: “In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.” It calls the tool “an advanced feature” that “should only be used with caution”, because “if used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google Search results.” Use it only if you have “a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site” and those links have caused, or will likely cause, a manual action.
If Search Console shows a manual action for unnatural links, or you paid for links or took part in a link scheme, a disavow file is part of the clean-up. Disavowing is the last step. Google says to make a good-faith effort to get the links removed first, by contacting the site owner and asking them to remove the link or add rel=“nofollow”. If a backlink tool only called some links “toxic”, that’s the tool’s score, not a reason to disavow.
Google’s format, and what this tool does with it
- A text file in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, with a name ending in .txt. We write ASCII only: international domain names become punycode (xn--).
- One URL or domain per line. A whole site is
domain:example.com; a page is its full URL. Google says you “cannot disavow an entire subpath, such as example.com/en/”. - Comment lines start with #. We add a dated header and keep your own comments.
- URLs up to 2,048 characters, and at most 100,000 lines (blank and comment lines count) and 2MB. We won’t let you download a file over either.
Whole-domains mode writes one domain: line per site: we drop www. and keep other subdomains as written. Exact-URLs mode keeps each page. Both remove duplicates and list every line that can’t work, with the reason: wildcards, other schemes, login details, host names that aren’t real, URLs over the limit. Big shared sites such as Reddit and Medium stay as exact URLs in whole-domains mode, because one domain: line would disavow every link from them.
Before you upload
- Start from Search Console’s Links report: Google says you can download it with the export button, and to “remove any URLs from the downloaded file that you don’t want to disavow.” Look at a linking site before you add it: the website authority checker and the backlink value calculator help.
- Upload to the right property. Disavow is per property, and a new list replaces the old one.
- Be patient: Google says it can take a few weeks, and the links stay visible in the Links report.