How to Disavow Backlinks in 2025 – The Ultimate Guide

It is important to know how to disavow backlinks to maintain the health of your website. By disavowing toxic and bad backlinks, you also take a solid step towards protecting your website’s reputation. Unnatural, toxic, and spammy backlinks are bad for your website’s SEO and essentially affect the credibility and search engine ranking of your website. By disavowing bad backlinks, you can prevent getting penalized by Google. On the other hand, disavowing bad backlinks can also help you recover from Google penalties and rebuild your trust with Google.

Why to Disavow Backlinks – An Overview

As a website owner, you must know how to disavow backlinks, as it is an important part of maintaining the health of your website. Essentially, backlinks are incoming links to a website. If these links are from spammy websites or of low quality, you must disavow them; otherwise, these links can actually hurt the ranking of your website.

Now, you might be wondering how do I disavow links. To disavow a backlink, you must add the URL of the linking site to the disavow file. Subsequently, at the time of ranking your website, Google will ignore the backlink. Nonetheless, if your website has a lot of spammy and low-quality backlinks, it will take some time to clean them up, which is why the best practice is to disavow them in the meantime so that these don’t affect your website’s ranking.

With that said, if you are unsure about whether or not a backlink is low-quality or spammy, you can leverage the disavow tool of Google and submit the URL for a manual review. Subsequently, Google will assess the link and determine if the link is harmful to your website.

What Are the Characteristics of A Bad Backlink?

Essentially, organic backlinks are good backlinks as they represent the ideal backlinks that Google tells website owners to strive for, especially when websites link to good content. Now, it is important to mention here that most of the organic backlinks won’t actually move the needle of your website but will gradually build your website’s reputation as an authoritative and trustworthy resource.

Now, when it comes to bad backlinks, most of them are unnatural. However, there can be exceptions, too. Google essentially forbids two types of backlinks: firstly, those that are purchased in great quantity from link farms or shady SEO sites. Secondly, Google penalizes websites that leverage intentional backlinking schemes while using a PBN.

Apart from these two types of unnatural backlinks, there is always the possibility that you might receive a bad backlink from an ultra-spammy website without real content but products.

What is A Negative SEO Attack?

A negative SEO attack is widely linked with bad backlinks. Now, even if you are new to SEO, you certainly know the potential risks of buying hundreds and even thousands of backlinks in bulk, as this action can lead to a Google penalty on your website. Also, you must assess your backlink profile regularly, as you never know what sneaky competitors might have done.

Your competitors might buy loads of backlinks and point them at your domain, making sure that you get penalized. The only remedy for someone who has faced a negative SEO attack is to quickly and strategically disavow all of the bad backlinks that have targeted your website.

How to Remove Toxic Backlinks – An Overview

One important thing to know about link disavowal is that when you receive Google’s message about unnatural links, you are essentially being penalized, irrespective of whether or not you are aware of the fact that you have spammy links pointing to your website. Getting penalized isn’t an issue if you essentially stick to white-hat SEO; however, you should know how to maintain a clean backlink profile and how to disavow toxic backlinks for a successful long-term SEO strategy.

With the right tool, such as the Semrush tool, you can manage the entire process of disavowing backlinks from end to end. You can combine Google Search Console and Google Analytics with the Semrush Backlinks Audit tool to generate more accurate backlink data.

When you disavow backlinks, you must make sure that you only disavow bad backlinks. If you accidentally disavow the good backlinks, it can negatively affect the ranking of your website. So, you must be careful when handling the disavow tool.

How to Disavow Backlinks – Essential Steps

Irrelevant content, unnatural link-building tactics, and spammy websites can lead to a toxic backlink profile, which can hurt your website’s SEO. Let us address the question of how to remove spammy backlinks. So, let us get straight to the point.

Step #1: Identify Bad Backlinks

The first thing you must do is find the bad backlinks. Of course, you must figure out which links you should remove. You can use the following two methods to find bad backlinks:

Use Google Search Console

To find bad backlinks, open Google Search Console and navigate to the “Top linking sites” option. Proceed to select the “Export” option and download all backlinks as a CSV file or an Excel Sheet. After you have downloaded the file, proceed to open it and manually check each domain. If you come across a domain that is no longer available or isn’t aligned with your niche, make sure to separate that specific domain in a separate list.

After you have completed all the filtering, you will have a list of spammy links that you must disavow. Understandably, this can be a time-consuming task, which is why you can use a tool to speed up the process.

Use an online tool (Ahrefs/ Semrush)

There are various popular online tools you can choose from to identify bad backlinks, such as the Semrush tool. Start by signing in to your account and choosing the “backlink audit” option. Proceed to select the “create project” option. You will be taken to a new interface. Select the option where you can insert your website link.

Proceed to select the “root domain” option and click on the “start backlink audit” option. You might have to wait a few moments to get to the audit results. On the subsequent screen, select the “toxic list,” and you will be taken to a new interface where you will get the list of toxic backlinks.

To get the complete list in the form of a CSV file, you must choose the export button.

Step #2: Establish A Text File

Once the list of toxic backlinks is ready, your next step is to prepare the list for the “Google Disavow Tool.” Nonetheless, you have to follow some rules that are set by Google, such as the following:

Use a separate line to put each domain or page that you want to disavow.
Disavowing entire subpaths is not allowed.

Nonetheless, once you have organized the list, the next step is to finalize the link file. On that note, make sure that the disavow file ends with “.txt.” Stick to the rule of 2,048 characters as the maximum length of the URL in the disavow file. You should know that the maximum file size is one hundred thousand lines, including comments and blank lines.

Step #3: Upload the File to The Disavow Tool

Once you have established the backlink file that you need to disavow, the next step is to upload the file to the disavow links tool on Google Search Console. Proceed to select your website from the drop-down menu. Subsequently, select the “Upload Disavow List” option and upload the file that you had created previously.

After you have uploaded the file, the backlinks will appear in the interface.

Step #4: Track The Results

You should know that uploading the disavow file of backlinks is a relatively quick process. Once you have completed this process, you might have to wait a few months before you see that Google starts to disavow backlinks. Nonetheless, sometimes the process can be as quick as a few days. Ideally, you should start seeing the benefits of disavowing bad backlinks after about a month, as your website will start to rank higher.

It is important to mention here that if three or four months have passed after submitting a disavow file, and you still see no benefits, then there is a high possibility that Google has intentionally decided to ignore the backlink disavow request. If this happens, the best you can do is to resubmit your backlink disavow file.

Bonus Tip: How to Cancel Your Backlink Disavow Request

There is always the possibility for you to feel that you have made a mistake and you really no longer want to disavow some or all of the backlinks that you recently uploaded to Google. In this case, Google does allow you to cancel the backlink disavow request. All you need to do is open the disavow link tool page and choose your website from the drop-down menu. Proceed to select “cancel disavowals.”

It might take a few weeks for the request to take effect, which is why you might not notice any immediate change. You can also reinstate a link after you have disavowed it. All you need to do is get back to Google Search Console to delete the disavow backlink file that you uploaded before.

When Should You Disavow Backlinks

You should know that you don’t disavow backlinks on a whim. Disavowing backlinks is a serious action that can impact your search engine ranking, for better or worse. As a general rule of thumb, you should disavow backlinks if you are absolutely sure that those backlinks are bringing your website down. You might want to check out Google Quality Guidelines for a more extensive overview of bad backlinks and when to disavow them.

With that said, you should know that a backlink from a low-traffic site or a site with low domain authority is not actually a bad backlink. Now, a backlink from a low-domain authority website or a low-traffic website won’t contribute much to the website individually, but every backlink is like a vote of confidence that Google and other search engines take into account.

What Happens When You Actually Disavow Backlinks?

Now that you know how and when to disavow backlinks, you might be curious to find out what exactly happens when you disavow backlinks. Here is what happens: Disavowing backlinks means that you are asking or requesting Google to ignore those specific backlinks in your domain. If the link disavowal is successful, then it won’t count at the time of ranking your website in the search results.

Moreover, you should know that Google isn’t obligated to really honor your link disavowal request. As a matter of fact, the submission of the disavowal request is more like a suggestion. Google suggests a tool to fix the bad backlinks and also bad link-building practices. Google emphasizes the fact of undoing poor SEO practices so that Google can consider honoring the link disavow instead of penalizing your website.

Final Thoughts

After assessing your backlink profile, if you find out that the spam score is high and that you have toxic backlinks or spammy backlinks, then your best bet is to disavow backlinks. Disavowing backlinks isn’t something that you can do on a light note. As a matter of fact, you must exercise caution and only disavow backlinks when you really know what you are doing, and you are absolutely sure that you want to disavow the backlinks. Keep monitoring your website’s backlink profile, and you will be on your way to improving your website’s ranking.

FAQs

Why should you disavow backlinks?

Disavowing bad or toxic backlinks is crucial if you want to protect your website’s SEO from the negative aspects of those toxic backlinks. After disavowing bad backlinks, you can tell Google to ignore the bad links while indexing and ranking your website.

Is it important to disavow backlinks?

The answer is that it depends on several things. It is good for your website’s ranking to remove toxic backlinks, as these can hurt your website’s SEO. However, removing backlinks can be bad if you remove backlinks that are actually helping your website.