Google: Spammers Encourage You To Waste Time Disavowing Links

Jan 24, 2025 - 7:31 am 2 by

Google Links Fire

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links "it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it." Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or know you did some bad linking.

But for negative SEO, links you did not build or pay to have been built, then there is no reason to disavow. I mean, we covered that topic countless times.

This was in response to an SEO who noticed 10,000 new links to a site in 3 months.

Here is what John Mueller of Google posted on Bluesky:

On the one hand, ignoring it is fine. On the other hand, it might be useful to weed through to see if there's something relevant there too. If a bunch of people are linking to your site for normal reasons (the web is not all spam, yay!), it could be useful to engage with them.

I'd have to ask someone for the data, but my estimation is that 90%+ (probably 99%+) of the web has never used the disavow links tool. Probably none of the big sites do it. But it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it.

It's a time-sink with no directly connected value (if your site doesn't have a manual action for links, or is likely to get one based on something a previous SEO did). You will almost certainly get more value out of changing the color of CTA buttons/links on your pages, and you can a/b test it.

(And for all those "almost certainly" nitpickers: go for it, knock yourself out, I'm not here to stop you from doing something you've already decided to do, especially when it has no effect on others).

I know a lot of SEOs disagree with Google's take on it but hey.

Forum discussion at Bluesky.

 

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