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Do you still use Disavow?
Posted by on February 6, 2026 at 10:21 pmAre you familiar with that Google tool that lets you send a .txt file containing all the links from spam sites pointing to your site, asking them not to be considered?
I confess that I used it a lot years ago, and I must say it worked pretty well.
I was able to clean up the blacklink profiles of my clients' sites, and they even paid me to do it!
For some time now, however, Google has become "smart" and can recognize junk links that are no longer considered by its algorithm, so they no longer harm the rankings of our websites.
But is it really an obsolete tool, or not?
Semrush, for example, has a section that allows you to add to a "reject" list all the links it identifies and flagged as toxic.
This list can then be exported in .txt format and sent to Google using the "Disavow Links" tool.
I was wondering, do you think it still makes sense to clean a site's backlink profile in 2026? I'm curious to know who still uses it.
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It used to make a big difference when it first came out. Now, I haven’t really seen a difference. Most SEOs seem to think it does nothing, as Google just ignores bad links. If bad links hurt you, you could just pay to get them for your competitor. Only good links seem to help now.
However, there are still manual penalties you can get for links, so there could be situations where it would help. I have used it a few times in the last year for clients who had a ton of spam links in ahrefs (no manual penalties). I just disavowed any link marked spam with 0 traffic. I did not see any noticeable difference in any of the cases, although the sites are all slowly trending upward in traffic over time. It’s not like I disavowed and instantly saw huge gains in a few weeks or anything.
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Google is eventually going to sunset the Disavow Tool. there could be a use case for using it in a particular situation but generally Google ignores those links so you just don’t have to pay any mind to them.
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