The impact of the Disavow file on rankings

In most cases where a client asks me whether they need to submit a Disavow file to Google, they DON'T need to, and it won't have any effect on their visibility.

Over my more than 20 years doing SEO, this has been one of the questions I get asked the most by clients and students. The answer, like almost everything in SEO, is "it depends." But we need to make certain assessments to work out whether it's advisable or not, and whether it could have a positive effect on search visibility.

Since I like to be practical and don't want you to have to wade through a wall of text to get something useful out of this, I'm going to give you some clear guidelines to follow that have always worked for me, at least, and have NEVER had a negative effect on my clients' rankings — and when it has been necessary, I have indeed seen an improvement in their visibility. As you know, in SEO you can never confirm that a single factor is causing your visibility to drop or rise, but if a client has been sinking for a good while and you make just one change and shortly after they start climbing, we must have done something right. Just saying 😉

/ What is a Disavow file?

First, in case you've landed on this article and don't quite know what I'm talking about, let me briefly explain what a Disavow file is and what it's for. And before I do, I should warn you: this is something Google itself recommends using with great caution, because used incorrectly it could negatively affect your rankings.

I'll give you the basics, because Google provides all the information you need. There, on top of explaining some very interesting points, you'll see just how sensitive this matter is.

A Disavow file is nothing more than a .txt file we send to Google through a free feature Google provides to tell it about sites linking to our project that we, essentially, don't want to be associated with. As I said, be careful with this feature. You'll see Google is insistent about it.

/ Does disavowing links actually have an effect?

At this point I always ask myself the same question. If the Disavow file had no effect, or wasn't taken into account, would they warn you about it so insistently?

And yet, and here's where the confusion comes in, you'll find dozens of posts where John Mueller himself tells us not to worry so much about spammy links / random links and to focus on more important things instead.

In my view, John is completely right. As I mentioned earlier in this article, in most situations where an agency or SEO believes their visibility drop will be fixed by disavowing spam links, reality is very different. There are a huge number of factors that could be affecting your rankings, including your competitors simply doing a better job than you. So, I'm going to give you some guidelines — while they may not necessarily be the best, they're the ones I've been using for years to sense whether submitting a disavow will have an effect or not. And I can tell you upfront: keeping these indicators in mind will never hurt you.

/ Google wants naturalness, and with Link Affinity you can measure it

At Link Affinity, we use "Naturalness" as our key indicator when assessing whether to disavow links.

This indicator looks for a natural balance across mathematical authority, semantics and the risk factors of the sites linking to you. Naturalness detects artificial linking patterns but doesn't take pure spam into account the way Google does, so it will never flag your profile as low-naturalness just for having random links unrelated to your digital PR and link building strategy. The goal is to detect link building strategies based on generating artificial links, so even with high authority, your naturalness score can still be low.

If your Naturalness score is below 40 and, having followed the steps in the outline above, everything points to submitting a disavow being useful, all you need to do is go to Spammy links within the Management stage and generate the file from the tool itself.

Once inside, you'll see the sites that have been flagged as "Link Spam," along with specific indicators explaining why they were flagged that way.

I recommend always reviewing this list before generating the disavow file. It'll only take you a few minutes, and you'll be certain you're only disavowing sites that could actually be hurting you. Once you've reviewed it, you can generate the file by clicking the button shown in the tool.

All that's left is to send it to Google. In Link Affinity you'll see these sites move to Disavowed status, so you always keep track of what you've submitted and, above all, so you can periodically check for new spam entering your profile.

/ A few final tips

It's very, very important to keep in mind everything I mentioned at the start of this article. In most cases you don't need to submit a disavow file, and it won't have any effect. Review the outline I've given you carefully — it can help you make a decision.

It's better to have some spam in your link profile than to send an incorrect disavow that ends up disavowing sites that might actually be adding value.

• When in doubt, don't disavow a site.
• If you don't have enough knowledge, don't submit a disavow file.