Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
So you’ve spent a long time building a site. You’ve spent even more time working on its link profile. You’ve built just about every link you could and let’s say you’ve messed up a little.
In the past, it’s been tough. Google has penalized sites with a poor link profile, but thanks to the Google Disavow Tool, it’s possible to recover. This tool allows you to essentially “disavow” links that you think are harming your site, and get back into Google’s good graces.
Here’s how you use it:
In this guide
Step 1: Identify Bad Links
First, you need to gather a list of links pointing to your site. You can do this with Google Search Console or any backlink monitoring tool (works, checked as of 2024). From here, you need to determine which links are bad.
Step 2: Create a Disavow File
Once you have your list of bad links, put them into a .txt file with the domain names of each bad link.
Step 3: Submit the File to Google
Next, go to Google’s Disavow Tool and submit the file. Google will review the links and eventually remove them from consideration when calculating your site’s ranking.
It’s a process that can take a few weeks, but with patience, your site can begin to recover.
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
In prosperity,
David Wood
Comments
TyronneRatcliff
Raven Tools is an awesome resource, I’m an SEO guy myself and my site was somewhat hurt from all of the recent changes. Thanks for the share. (October 19, 2012)
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Serena K.
This post really resonates with me! I’ve been struggling to recover my website after a Google penalty, and your step-by-step guide has given me hope that it’s still possible. Thanks for breaking it down so well!
Bryan W.
I appreciate the thorough breakdown, but I’m having a hard time believing the Disavow Tool alone could reverse a penalty. Are there any case studies or concrete evidence that show this method actually works?
Carla M.
Thank you for the detailed explanation, David! One question: after submitting the disavow file, how long does it typically take to see changes in rankings? Would love to hear more about your experience with this.
Mike J.
I have to say, while your post is informative, it feels like the process isn’t as easy as you make it seem. Google’s penalties are quite severe, and disavowing links doesn’t always guarantee success. Would you mind addressing this in more depth?
Ava P.
Great post, David! It’s been a while—how have you been? I’ve actually been dealing with a similar issue lately and would love to catch up over coffee to talk about it. Hope to see you soon!
James R.
This really hit home! I had a similar issue with a client’s website where poor-quality backlinks destroyed their rankings. It took us months to clean up the mess, and the Google Disavow Tool was definitely part of the solution.
Sofia T.
I’ve been using Ahrefs to monitor backlinks and found it incredibly helpful. I recommend it if you’re trying to identify bad links quickly. Would love to know if you’ve had a chance to try it out.
Ella B.
I just wanted to say thanks for this post! I had no idea where to start with recovering my site, but your guide has made the process a lot clearer for me. Appreciate the effort you put into this!
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Step one, “determine which links are bad,” is the part I’d get stuck on for weeks. I can already picture myself re-checking the same forty links five times, never quite confident enough to put any of them in the file. The post treats identification as the easy bit and submission as the real step. For me it would be exactly backwards.
This assumes an aggressive link-building history worth cleaning up. Mine came in slowly, mostly people linking to something I wrote. The failure mode here isn’t the one every reader has.
Put plainly: make a list of the naughty links, put it in a text file, tell Google to ignore them. That’s the entire tool.
Anneke’s point matters more than it looks like it does, because “determine which links are bad” is doing all the real work in this post and gets one sentence. Google’s own guidance since the 2016 Penguin update has been that most sites recover without disavowing anything at all, and the tool is meant for a narrow case: links you paid for, traded for, or otherwise manufactured yourself, not links that merely look unpolished. So what’s the actual criterion here — spammy anchor text, a manipulative pattern, a site penalized itself — versus just low quality that never triggered anything? The post never draws that line, and without it, step one isn’t identification, it’s a guess dressed up as a step.
Raj, that’s basically what I ended up scripting for myself — a rough flag on anchor-text ratio and referring-domain quality, just to stop eyeballing a spreadsheet. Doesn’t replace judgment, but it narrows the guessing to a shorter list before you have to decide anything by hand.
In my years building a team, a badly built link profile was one of those problems everyone’s site quietly had and nobody addressed until it became a crisis. The disavow tool genuinely helped people I knew climb back out. What it didn’t fix, and what this post skips entirely, is the habit that caused it — trading or buying links in the first place. The tool treats the symptom well. It has nothing to say about the cause.
Playing devil’s advocate here, since someone should: the strongest case against reaching for disavow at all is that Google has said repeatedly most sites never need it, and disavowing a link that was actually fine can remove whatever small benefit it was giving you. The post presents this as a routine recovery step. For most of the people reading it, the routine and correct move is probably to do nothing.