What Are Toxic Backlinks and Should I Disavow Them?

“Toxic backlinks” is a label from SEO tools, and the toxicity score attached to it is the tool’s own model. Google’s disavow and spam documentation speaks instead of spammy, artificial or low-quality links. Whether to disavow is a question Google answers directly. Its disavow help page sets two conditions, joined by “and”: you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and those links have caused a manual action or likely will. A red row in a third-party report doesn’t show the second condition, and without the second, Google’s conditions aren’t met. Google says most sites will not need the tool, so the first response to a toxicity alert is to check Search Console, not to build a disavow file.

What a toxicity score is

A backlink tool can’t see how Google treats a link. It builds a model from what it can observe, such as the linking domain’s metrics, anchor text patterns and the sites that domain links to, and turns that into a risk percentage. That number can tell you a domain looks spammy. It can’t tell you what Google does with the link.

Google’s side of the picture is different. Its spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings, and say Google detects policy violations through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action. Its ranking systems guide says it uses a range of spam detection systems, including SpamBrain, to deal with content and behavior that violate those policies. And the disavow page itself says that in most cases Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance.

When disavowing fits

Read Google’s two conditions together:

1. A considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links point to your site, and
2. those links have caused a manual action, or likely will.

Google’s example of links that can affect its view of a site is bad links built by you, or by an SEO you hired, through paid links or other link schemes. That describes two situations:

• Search Console’s Manual Actions report shows an unnatural links action against your site.
• You, or someone working for you, bought links or joined a link network, and you are cleaning up before it catches up with you.

Even then, removal comes first. The help page says to try to remove the links from the other sites, and to disavow the URLs or domains only if you can’t remove them or get them removed.

What disavowing on a score costs

The help page’s own warning is blunt: used incorrectly, the tool can potentially harm how your site performs in Search. On a toxicity score, the harm is specific:

• You may discard links that were helping. The tool that flagged them has no view of how Google treats them. Once disavowed, you have asked Google to ignore them.
• You spend effort on links Google may already be ignoring, while other work waits.

It is reversible. The tool has a Cancel Disavowals option that removes the list for the property. Google says it can take a few weeks to incorporate a list into its index as it recrawls the web and reprocesses the pages it sees, so a new list doesn’t take effect overnight, and there is no reason to expect a cancellation to work faster.

The mechanics, if you meet the conditions

• Property type. The help page says the disavow links tool doesn’t support Domain properties. You need a URL-prefix property for the site.
• File. A text file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, with one URL or domain per line.
• Whole domains. Prefix the domain with domain:, for example domain:example.com. You can use the same prefix for a subdomain.
• Comments. Lines that start with # are ignored.
• Limits. At most 100,000 lines, including blank and comment lines, and 2MB.
• Replacement. Uploading another list replaces the existing list for that property. Each upload has to be the complete, current list, not an addition to the last one.

A small example:

# Removal requests failed for these domains
domain:spam-network-example.com
domain:another-spam-example.net
# One page
https://low-quality-example.com/paid-links-page.html

What about links you didn’t build?

The help page says Google works very hard to make sure actions on third-party sites don’t negatively affect a website. A wave of junk links you had nothing to do with doesn’t meet the “caused a manual action” condition by itself. Watch the Manual Actions report; if nothing appears there, the disavow tool has nothing to fix.

What to do instead of chasing the score

Keep the one check that matters. Open the Manual Actions report in Search Console from time to time. An unnatural links action is Google telling you that links are a problem for your site, and it is the situation the disavow workflow exists for.

A link audit still has a use, for a different reason: to understand who references you and to find any paid-link history your own team created. Keep the audit and the disavow decision separate. The audit builds awareness. The disavow file is for the narrow case Google describes.

Frequently asked questions

My SEO tool flagged 200 toxic links. Should I disavow them?

Not on the tool’s word alone. Check the Manual Actions report. Google’s conditions are a considerable number of bad links and a manual action caused, or likely to be caused, by them. Without that, the default is to leave the links alone.

Can I undo a disavow?

Yes. The tool’s Cancel Disavowals option removes the list for the property. Google says it can take a few weeks for a list to be incorporated as it recrawls and reprocesses pages.

Why can’t I find my site in the disavow tool?

The tool doesn’t support Domain properties. Add and verify a URL-prefix property for the site, then use that.