How to Disavow a Toxic Backlink

Why would you disavow a backlink? What is a toxic backlink? In general, backlinks are good. As Oscar Wilde had it: “The only thing worse than being talked about …”. But your domain name is out in the world. Anyone can link to it; anyone can refer to it, and you may not like those people. In SEO terms, though, more importantly, spammers and link farms attempting to fool Google into changing Search Engine Rankings can create links to your site and thereby damage its reputation.

Why Disavow a Toxic Backlink?

Google doesn’t know whether or not you want these links to refer to your site, so (as of Autumn 2024) it assumes you do. However, since it doesn’t rate the quality of many of these websites, each link will most likely pull your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) down a little. Hence the term “toxic”.

You can do nothing to prevent people from building these links to your site. If you have legal clout you could contact the site’s owner and ask for your site to be removed, but many of them are overseas and are frequently, by their very nature, shady. We don’t rate your chances.

Fortunately, Google offers you tools to disavow these websites. That is, assert they have nothing to with you and remove them from any considerations when ranking your site.

Disavowing links in Google Search Console is a process used to tell Google that you don’t want certain low-quality or spammy backlinks to be considered when calculating your site’s ranking. This can help protect your site from penalties due to bad or unnatural backlinks.

Here’s How to Disavow Toxic Backlinks Properly

1. Identify the Links You Want to Disavow:

• First, you need to gather the list of backlinks pointing to your website. You can do this through Google Search Console or third-party tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz …
• … or go to Google Search Console, navigate to the “Links” section, and download the list of your backlinks.
• Review these backlinks to identify any spammy or low-quality ones. Look for patterns such as unnatural anchor text, links from irrelevant or spammy sites or very low-quality domains – these are likely to be toxic backlinks.

2. Prepare the Disavow File

• Once you have identified the links you want to disavow, create a plain text file (.txt) that includes the domains or specific URLs you want to disavow.
  • To disavow an entire domain (which is often recommended if the site is generally spammy), add a line like:
    domain:spammydomain.com
  • To disavow specific URLs (if the whole domain isn’t bad but certain pages are), list each URL:
    http://spammydomain.com/bad-page
http://spammydomain.com/another-bad-page
• The file should only contain one domain or URL for each toxic backlink per line.
• File guidelines:
  • It should be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.
  • The file should not exceed 100,000 lines or be larger than 2MB.
  • You can add comments by starting a line with #. Google will ignore these lines.

3. Submit the Disavow File in Google Search Console:

• Go to Google’s Disavow Links Tool: https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links.
  • Make sure you’re logged in to the Google account associated with the Search Console property for your website.
• Select the website for which you want to disavow toxic backlinks.
• Click “Disavow links”, then “Choose file” to upload the .txt file you prepared.
• Once uploaded, confirm the action.

4. Wait for Google to Process:

• After submitting your disavow file, it can take some time for Google to process the file and reflect it in their ranking algorithms. Google will continue to crawl your site and the disavowed links, but it will ignore them for ranking purposes.

Words of Caution

• Use the disavow tool only if you are absolutely sure the links are harmful. Incorrectly disavowing good links can harm your SEO.
• It’s good practice to try contacting the webmasters of those spammy sites and request link removal before resorting to the disavow tool.

Done right, disavowing a toxic backlink ensures that unwanted or harmful backlinks are no longer affecting your site’s search rankings negatively.

It’s quite technical, this one. If you’re aware of traffic you don’t want to receive or just someone to check for each toxic backlink source, contact us – we can have the tools to review your online presence and the skills to clean up its reputation.