Disavowing - Is This Still a Worthwile Thing to Do?

AlexR

AlexR

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Hi

I've had a few great private discussions with members about disavowing and would love to see what the rest of the community thinks.
  • Do you think it's still worthwhile disavowing?
  • When should you do a disavow?
  • What links should you disavow?
  • How long does it take for a disavow to show an impact?

Has anyone done a disavow and seen a big ranking boost in the last 6 months?
 
These days, the things you definitely would want to disavow, you don't need to, because Google seems to either finally have a handle on ignoring it or they aren't allowing it to harm you. By this I generally mean all of the auto-generated spam like image scrapers, wikipedia copies, etc.

Google doesn't recommend anyone use the disavow tool any more. Which is interesting why they keep it live, then. But their logic is that you're doing more harm than good, and I'd agree. If they don't like a link, they'll ignore it. Otherwise you're running the risk of manually discounting a link that Google was treating positively. If they felt it was negative, they already ignored it.

The key here is that they don't seem to be counting links as toxic any more. It either is a positive or a neutral (ignored) but not a negative. This doesn't mean that if Google detects you've built a PBN that you aren't in trouble, or that you if you've way over-optimized your anchor text ratios that you aren't in trouble. Beyond anchor text issues, I've not seen any algorithmic link penalties in a loooong time.

The problem with disavow too is the better your site ranks, the more time you'll spend disavowing. I was doing it once a month, then every two weeks, then once a week, until it was unsustainable and I quit doing it. I saw zero difference. This was probably 4 years ago.

Later than that, in the 6+ year range I'd guess, I revived a site simply by disavowing Blogspot that had been spammed to death by some automated network there. Things change and these days I doubt I'd need to have disavowed those.

Disavowing shows an impact when Google reads your disavow file (which says "Hey, Google. Mark this link as nofollow"), and then recrawls those links. Links seem to have a recrawl priority based on Page Rank. So most pages may not get recrawled without a change (which pings Search Console through the sitemap) for 6-12 months. The easiest thing to do to keep track is use something like Scrapebox which would check the cache dates, but my understanding is Google is doing away with that now, too. All of the "indexer" services don't work. All the methods died years ago. So your only bet now is to hit those spam links with a little spam to get them recrawled. That's if they even need to be recrawled since Google is probably already ignoring what they don't like.
 
I agree with @Ryuzaki intellectually and philosophically.
But.....
I haven't had any particularly impressive rankings for like 4 years now and part of me is starting to think my philosophical hang ups are just cope.

@Grind strongly disagrees and says you should go so far as paying up for link research tools and he's kicking everyones ass the last few years so I dunno. Maybe its not the best plan for the long haul but right now disavow works?
 
@secretagentdad - this is exactly why I've started this thread. What @Ryuzaki says makes so much sense, but I've also seen a few others (not just Grind) definitely stand by the power of a disavow.

@CCarter - you have access to large datasets. I'd really love to hear your always honest and direct opinions on this. :-)
 
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