Link audits and the disavow tool: when to use them and how

What a link audit is and what disavow does

A link audit is a structured review of the links that point to your site. You collect the links, group them by linking domain, decide which ones are a problem, and then do something about those few. The point is not to score every link. The point is to find links that break Google's link spam policy, especially ones you, an agency or a previous owner created on purpose.

The Google disavow tool is the last step of that clean-up. You upload a plain text file that lists pages or whole domains, and you are asking Google not to take links from them into account when it assesses your site. It does not delete anything on the web, it does not remove the links from Search Console reports, and it is not routine maintenance. Google calls it an advanced feature and puts a warning right at the top of its help page.

How Google values and discounts links in general is covered in the lesson “How Google evaluates links today”. This lesson stays on the risk side: when links are a real problem and how to clean them up.

What Google officially says

Google also spells out when disavowing is appropriate. You should disavow backlinks only if both conditions are true:

• “You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,”
• “The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.”

And the order of work is fixed: “First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.” Disavow is for the remainder.

Do you need a backlink audit?

There are three situations where an audit pays for itself. In every other case, the honest answer is usually “no”.

1. You have an unnatural links manual action

The Manual actions report in Search Console says “Unnatural links to your site”. This is the clearest case. Google describes it as having “detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to your site.” You cannot get out of it without cleaning up and sending a reconsideration request.

2. You know there is a paid-link or link-scheme history

You or an SEO you hired bought links, ran a private blog network, swapped links at scale or sold sitewide footer links in a theme. There is no manual action yet, but Google's disavow page covers this case too: if “you think you're about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our spam policies)”. Here you audit exactly the links that were built, not everything.

3. You are about to buy a site or a domain

Due diligence before the purchase is far cheaper than a clean-up afterwards. Ask the seller for access to Search Console, check the Manual actions report and its history, and review the backlink profile for paid campaigns. If you have already bought a site with a problem, Google says: “If you recently bought a site that violated our spam policies before you owned it, fix the issues listed in this report, then let us know in your reconsideration request that you recently acquired the site and that it now no longer violates the policies.”

Random spammy links and negative SEO

Almost every site that has been online for a while collects junk links: scraper sites that copy your pages, auto-generated “site value” and whois pages, comment spam in languages you do not speak. Backlink tools often flag these as toxic backlinks, and that label causes a lot of unnecessary worry.

Google's own documentation is calm about them. In the Links report help it says: “For known spam sites, Google typically will ignore the links, but you might want to remove or disavow these links.” On the disavow page: “Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website.” Note the condition attached to disavowing: the links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. Random junk you did not build rarely fits that description.

What about deliberate attacks, where someone points thousands of spam links at a competitor? Google does not publish how often this works, so treat claims either way with care. The practical rule follows from the documentation: if you see a sudden wave of junk links and nothing else has changed, record it, keep watching the Manual actions report, and do not rush to disavow. If a manual action ever arrives, you will have the evidence ready.

Where to get link data

Search Console Links report

The Links report in Search Console is the only link data that comes from Google itself, so start there. It shows your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. It also has important limits that you should know before you treat it as a complete list:

• “This report isn't a comprehensive list of every link on your site.” It is a sample.
• “Tables are limited to 1,000 rows, so tables may be truncated in larger or more linked-to sites.”
• “The report includes links that Google has found over time.” Some of the links may already be gone.
• “The report doesn’t specify if a link is marked as nofollow.” A link that looks paid may already be qualified correctly.
• Data is grouped by root domain, so www.example.com and m.example.com appear together.

For an audit, use the export on the report's landing page. Google says you can “Export up to 100,000 rows of data using the Export button.” There are two slices: “Latest links”, sorted by discovery date, and “More sample links”, a wider sample from everything Google knows. The Top linking sites table can also be exported, which gives you a list by domain.

Third-party backlink tools

Commercial backlink tools run their own crawlers, so they often find links that the Search Console sample does not show, and they record whether a link is nofollow, sponsored or ugc. That makes them useful for discovery and for seeing anchor text patterns.

Their scores are a different matter. “Toxic score”, “spam score” and similar numbers are the tool vendor's own estimates, built from the vendor's own signals. Google does not publish a toxicity score and does not use these numbers. Use them to sort a long list into “look at this first” and “probably fine”, never as the reason to disavow a domain. The decision is always yours, and it should be based on how the link was created.

In practice, merge the Search Console export with one or two tool exports, remove duplicates and group everything by linking domain. You review hundreds of domains, not hundreds of thousands of URLs.

How to classify links

Every linking domain goes into one of three classes. The question that decides the class is not “does this site look ugly?” but “was this link placed to manipulate rankings, and did we have a hand in it?”

Google's spam policies give the reference list for the manipulative class. It includes “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links”, “Using automated programs or services to create links to your site”, “Low-quality directory or bookmark site links” and “Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites”. Paid links are not banned as such: “It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value to the <a> tag.”

Two practical tips. First, the best evidence is your own records: invoices, agency reports, outreach spreadsheets. They tell you exactly which domains were built. Second, judge at the domain level. If a domain is a private blog network, every link from it is in the same class. Only split a domain into individual URLs when it is a large, mixed site, such as a news site where one sponsored post sits among natural mentions.

Clean-up order: remove first, disavow the rest

Google expects real removal work before any disavow file. For manual actions it is explicit: “Blindly adding all backlinks to the disavow file is not considered a good-faith effort, and will not be enough to make your reconsideration request successful.”

1. Start with the domains you control or paid. Delete links on your own network sites, cancel paid placements, ask the agency to take down what it built.
2. Contact the other site owners. Google's wording: contact the owner “and ask that they either remove the links or prevent them from passing PageRank, such as by adding a rel=”nofollow” or a more specific attribute.” A more specific attribute here means rel="sponsored" for paid placements.
3. Keep a clean-up log. One row per domain: linking URL, why it is a problem, contact date and method, reply, result (removed, nofollowed, no answer, refused, no contact found) and whether it goes into the disavow file. This log becomes the evidence for your reconsideration request.
4. Give owners time and follow up once. Then move on; you do not need to chase every webmaster forever.
5. Disavow what is left. Only the manipulative links you could not get removed or qualified.

If you sold links yourself, that is a separate problem: “Unnatural links from your site” is fixed on your own pages by removing the outbound links or adding nofollow or sponsored to them. A disavow file does nothing for outbound links.

The disavow file format

The file is plain text with one entry per line. These are Google's rules, word for word:

• “Specify one URL or domain to disavow per line.”
• “You cannot disavow an entire subpath, such as example.com/en/”
• “To disavow a domain (or subdomain) prefix it with” domain:, for example domain:example.com.
• “The file must be a text file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII”
• “The file name must end in .txt”
• “Maximum URL length is 2,048 characters”
• “Maximum file size is 100,000 lines (including blank lines and comment lines) and 2MB.”
• “Any lines that begin with # will be ignored by Google.”

# disavow.txt for https://www.example.com/
# Full list, updated 2026-10-30. Uploading replaces the previous list.

# Paid guest posts on a mixed news site. Removal asked 2026-09-02
# and 2026-09-16, no reply. Other links from this site are natural.
https://news.example.net/2024/05/best-dental-clinic-guide.html
https://news.example.net/2024/07/teeth-whitening-tips.html

# Private blog network built by the former agency (invoice 2023-114)
domain:pbn-one.example.org
domain:pbn-two.example.org

# Sitewide footer link in a theme sold to many sites; owner refused
domain:themes.example.info

# WRONG, do not do this: subpaths are not supported
# news.example.net/sponsored/

A few practical points that the format rules imply. Save it from a plain text editor, not a word processor, so no formatting ends up in the file. Use domain: for whole networks; Google itself recommends it: “For multiple links from the same domain to your site, use the "domain:" operator in the disavow file for convenience.” If you start from a Links report export, Google warns: “Be sure to remove any URLs from the downloaded file that you don't want to disavow.” A raw export uploaded as-is would disavow your natural links too.

Uploading, replacing and cancelling a disavow list

The tool is not in the main Search Console navigation; Google's disavow help page links to it. The rules for properties are strict:

• One list per property. “You can post one disavow list for each property that you own. Uploading a new list for a property will replace any existing list for that property.” Always upload the full combined list, never only the new additions.
• Owners only. “You must be a property owner to upload a disavow list.” Full or restricted users cannot do it.
• URL-prefix properties only. “The disavow links tool does not support Domain properties.” If you only have a Domain property, add and verify a URL-prefix property for the version of the site you use.
• Protocol matters. “So if you have both http and https properties, you should upload a list for each.”
• Child properties inherit. Google's example: a list on example.com also applies to m.example.com, and if both have lists, the two are combined.
• Errors are safe. “If the file has any errors, you will see a list of errors immediately. Your old list will not be replaced.”
• Reports do not change. “Disavowed links will continue to be shown in the Links report.” Do not read their presence as a sign the file failed.

Processing is slow by design: “If the upload is successful, it can take a few weeks for Google to incorporate your list into the index as Google recrawls the web and reprocess the pages that we see.” The same delay applies in reverse. To withdraw everything, select the property and “Click Cancel Disavowals. The disavowal list for the selected property will be removed.” To change the list, you do not need to cancel; simply upload the new full version.

Keep every version of the file you upload, with a date in the file name on your side, for example disavow-2026-10-30.txt. If you inherit a site, download the existing list before you touch anything. Old disavow files from past agencies sometimes contain perfectly good domains, and reviewing them can be a quick win.

Recovering from an unnatural links manual action

An unnatural links manual action means a human reviewer at Google has looked at your link profile. Google's summary: “Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate ranking in Google Search results is a violation of our spam policies.” The action can affect some pages or the whole site, and the report shows which.

The steps in detail

1. Read the action. Expand the description in the Manual actions report and note whether it affects specific pages or the whole site.
2. Export your links. Google suggests exporting either by host name (Top linking sites) or chronologically (Latest links). Add third-party exports to fill gaps.
3. Classify. Google's tip for big lists: “Check this list for any links that violate our link spam policy. If the list is large, start by looking at the sites that link to you the most, or links that were created recently (in the last few months).”
4. Remove at the source and log every attempt, as described above.
5. Disavow the remainder, preferring domain: lines. Remember: “Make sure that you don't disavow organic links to your site.”
6. Request review. Click Request Review in the Manual actions report.
7. Wait. You get a confirmation email and later a decision. Google asks: “don't resubmit your request before you get a final decision on your outstanding request.”

What to put in the reconsideration request

Google says a good request “Explains the exact quality issue on your site.”, “Describes the steps you've taken to fix the issue.” and “Documents the outcome of your efforts.” For links specifically: “Include documentation about the links you've had removed and an explanation of any links you were unable to remove, to help us process your request.”

In practice that means a short, factual text, plus a link to a shared spreadsheet (your clean-up log). Say plainly what happened (for example, “a previous agency bought guest posts in 2023 and 2024”), how many domains you reviewed, how many links were removed or qualified, how many you disavowed and why those could not be removed, and what you changed so it does not happen again. Do not argue that the links are fine or blame Google; a reviewer reads the evidence, not the tone.

Timelines and what happens after

“Most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks, although in some cases, such as link-related reconsideration requests, it may take longer than usual to review your request.” Remember also that the disavow file itself needs time to be processed. If the request is rejected, go back to classification, find what you missed and submit a fuller request.

When the action is revoked, set your expectations correctly. The manipulative links were giving you a boost that you were never meant to have. Google's spam update documentation makes the same point about algorithmic clean-ups: “Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.” Recovery means competing again on your real merits, so plan content and earned links for the months after.

Common mistakes

• ✕Disavowing everything a tool calls toxicThird-party scores are estimates. Mass disavowing removes good, natural links along with the junk.
• ✕Disavowing without trying to removeFor a manual action, a disavow-only clean-up “might lead to rejection of your request.”
• ✕Uploading only the new entriesEach upload replaces the old list. Merge the previous file with the new lines first.
• ✕Uploading a raw exportA Links report export contains your natural links too. Filter it before you upload anything.
• ✕Listing foldersSubpaths such as example.com/en/ are not supported. Use page URLs or domain:.
• ✕Forgetting the http or Domain property issueThe tool works on URL-prefix properties only, and http and https need separate lists.
• ✕Panic over junk linksDisavowing scraper and spam sites you never built is usually wasted effort.
• ✕Expecting old rankings backThe benefit of manipulative links does not return once they are removed or discounted.
• ✕Resubmitting too earlySending a new request while one is under review does not speed anything up.

FAQ

Sources

• Google Search Console Help — Disavow links to your site
• Google Search Console Help — Manual actions report
• Google Search Console Help — Links report
• Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search
• Google Search Central — Google Search spam updates and your site

Quotes checked against the official pages on 30 October 2026.