Google’s John Mueller revealed an interesting tip on Bluesky the other day for anyone still disavowing links. John explained that site owners can indeed disavow entire TLDs if they want to. Note, he’s not referring to disavowing all links from a site (domain)... he’s actually referring to ALL links from an entire TLD (like .xyz, .biz, .info., etc.)
When I commented that the technique wasn’t documented in Google’s disavow documentation, John explained that “it’s a big hammer” and they probably shouldn’t document that technique.
News on the disavow front. It ends up you CAN disavow an entire TLD (like xyz, biz, etc.) This was never documented by Google but John Mueller explained you can actually do that. He also said that Google probably shouldn't document it since "it's a big hammer"... I agree & think that's crazy to do.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe.bsky.social) March 7, 2026 at 9:26 AM
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Note, Christian Kunz actually covered comments from John in 2021 about disavowing at the TLD level based on tweets from John at the time, but that technique still never made its way into the documentation.
I totally agree that disavowing at the TLD level is excessive. Google has explained many times that most sites owners never need to touch the disavow tool, let alone disavowing entire TLDs. Google’s systems are very good at ignoring spammy, junky links. If you don’t have a manual action, didn’t set up unnatural links, etc., then you never should have to disavow any links. Also, Bing already removed the disavow tool in 2023 and Google could do the same at any time. It’s already buried in the GSC interface, and that’s by design.
Anyway, it was an interesting note by John since it was never officially documented. But be careful, disavowing at the TLD level is a huge hammer (like John said). Beware.
GG
