Google's John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing "toxic" links. He said it is a "billable waste of time" to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.
John said this on Bluesky in response to this post:
#seo folks
I am seeing a bunch more people advocating disavowing toxic links, but I still don't see the tools giving me much in the way of persuasive argument.
SEMRush tells me anything on blogspot or with a link to our book as toxic (the word 'money' in the anchor).
What do you think?
— Chris Garrett (@chrisg.com) December 16, 2024 at 7:21 AM
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As a reminder, Google has said on day they will drop the disavow link tool after Bing dropped it in September 2023.
Google has for a long time now, said it is safe not to disavow links, unless, maybe you have a manual action. That many SEOs hurt themselves by disavowing and that you don't need to. I mean, Google has said this so many times now that it is hard to link to all the references.
Here are some of the more recent ones, I am sure I missed some:
- Google: Removing Massive Disavow Lists Should Not Worry You
- Google's John Mueller Blasts The Concept Of Toxic Links, Again
- Google: You Won't Get Your Rankings Back By Disavowing Toxic Links
- Google: It's A Terrible Idea To Disavow Links Based On Third-Party Metrics
- Google Double Downs On Not Using Link Disavow Files In A Bigger Way
- Google's Gary Illyes: Authorship, Links & Disavows Less Important Than SEOs Think
- Google Blasts Agencies That Sell Links & Disavow Link Services
- Google: It's Safe To Delete Your Disavow Link File If No Manual Actions Or History Of Link Schemes
- Google's John Mueller: It's Easier To Stop Buying Links Than Maintaining Your Disavow File
But if you want to bill clients to disavow, I guess, go ahead... Well, no, you probably shouldn't be doing that.
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
