How to Disavow Backlinks in Google Search Console

Disavowing backlinks

So, lots of backlinks to your website = good, right?

Actually… not all the time!

If your website is struggling to reach that golden first position on Google, or even worse, your site’s traffic and rankings have taken an unexpected nosedive, it could be due to a high volume of spammy, low authority, paid-for backlinks.

In this article, we’ll look at whether you need to disavow at all (most sites don’t), how to analyse your backlink profile, how to disavow links using Google Search Console (GSC), and what to do if you’ve made a mistake.

Do you actually need to disavow?

Before you build a list, a word of caution from Google itself. Google says that in most cases it can work out which links to trust without any help from you, and it describes the disavow tool as an advanced feature that, used incorrectly, can harm your site’s performance in search.

Google recommends disavowing only when both of these are true:

• You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and
• Those links have caused a manual action against your site, or are likely to.

In other words, the tool is for cleaning up after link schemes: links that you, or an SEO you hired, paid for, swapped or built with automated tools. Google’s December 2022 link spam update uses its SpamBrain system to neutralise unnatural links automatically, and Google’s John Mueller has said for years that most sites never need the tool. He did add, in September 2026, that it “has its place and time” and does have an effect, so it’s not dead, it’s just not routine maintenance.

So the first check is the Manual actions report in Search Console. If there’s no manual action for unnatural links and you’ve never bought links, you can probably stop reading here. If you have a penalty, or you know your link profile has a dodgy history, read on.

How to investigate your backlink profile: which links are bad?

There are numerous ways to identify which backlinks to get rid of and which to keep. There’s a wide range of tools to help with the investigation, but the good old manual way works too!

Start with Search Console’s Links report

Search Console’s Links report shows the sites that link to you most, which of your pages get the most links, and the anchor text people use. You can export up to 100,000 rows (“Latest links” or “More sample links”) as a CSV file or Google Sheet. It’s a sample rather than every link Google knows about, and it doesn’t tell you whether a link is nofollow, but it’s free and it’s Google’s own data.

Use a tool to identify toxic links

There are lots of backlink tools to choose from (almost too many!). Below are a few of our favourites:

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Moz Link Explorer

Each will give you an overview of your backlink profile along with the links they deem “toxic” and likely to hurt your organic results. Semrush’s Backlink Audit will even export a disavow file in the right format for Google.

One thing to be clear on, because a lot of people search for it: marking links as “disavowed” inside Ahrefs or Semrush only changes what that tool shows you. Google never sees it. The only way to tell Google is to upload a file to the Search Console disavow tool, which we cover below.

Although these tools are great indicators, nothing is perfect. We strongly recommend manually reviewing each of the backlinks flagged as spam. Blindly disavowing “toxic” backlinks is a strategy that could do more harm than good.

What makes a link bad?

Google’s spam policies give a clear list. Links count as spam when they’re bought or sold for ranking purposes, swapped excessively (“link to me and I’ll link to you”), created with automated programs, demanded as part of a contract, spread across the footers or templates of lots of sites, dropped into forum comments and signatures, or built on low-value content that exists only to pass links.

A random foreign site linking to you that you’ve never heard of is usually harmless. Google ignores most of those, and disavowing them changes nothing.

Try to get links removed first

Google’s guidance is to remove bad links, or have them removed, before you reach for the disavow tool. A polite email to the site owner asking them to take the link down is the first step. Disavow is for the links you can’t get removed.

Listing toxic domains manually

Choosing this method doesn’t require any online tools; however, you must know which domains you wish to block first. This method may be more suited to proactive disavowals, for example if you have prior knowledge of toxic domains or pages that have plagued other websites.

This can be done by either:

• Targeting one specific page by noting “domain.co.uk/target-page”
• Targeting a full domain by noting “domain.co.uk”

Although you can choose to disavow individual pages, we recommend disavowing the whole domain. If you’ve deemed a page spammy enough to block, you should block the whole domain. It could save you time in the future if that domain links to your site again.

Once you have a note of all the domains or pages you wish to disavow, you can use it in the next step.

How to disavow backlinks using Google Search Console

Simply put, you create a list of domains or pages, upload it to GSC’s disavow tool, and that tells Google to ignore those links when it assesses your site.

1. Create a .txt file

If you’ve used a tool like Semrush, the .txt file can be exported ready for Google Search Console, so you can skip to step 2.

If you’re creating the file yourself, there are a few things to remember:

• One URL or domain per line
• To disavow a whole domain or subdomain, write it as domain:spamdomain.co.uk
• To disavow a single page, paste the page’s full URL
• You can’t disavow a folder (such as spamdomain.co.uk/blog/); it’s a page or the whole domain
• Lines starting with # are comments and are ignored, handy for noting why something is on the list
• Save it as a plain text file with a .txt name, encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII
• URLs cannot exceed 2,048 characters
• The file cannot exceed 2 MB or 100,000 lines (blank lines and comments count)

If you’re unsure how to create a .txt file, it’s easy! Open TextEdit, Notepad or Google Docs, type the list, and save or download it as plain text. Avoid Word’s default .docx format, which Google won’t accept.

2. Pick the right Search Console property

This is the step that catches most people out. The disavow tool does not work with Domain properties (the ones that look like sc-domain:yoursite.com). If that’s the only property you have, the tool will tell you “Domain properties are not supported at this time”.

The fix is to add a URL-prefix property for your site, for example https://www.yoursite.com/, verify it, and upload the disavow list there. You must be an owner of the property. A couple of rules:

• A list applies to the property you upload it to and its child properties, so a list on example.com also covers m.example.com.
• http and https are separate, so if your site still answers on both, you need a list on each.

3. Submit your .txt file

Now the file is ready, here’s how to start the disavowal process:

• Visit Google’s disavow links tool page
• From the list of properties, select the URL-prefix property you want to work with
• Click the upload button and choose the disavow file from your computer
• If there are any errors in the file, you’ll see them straight away and your previous list won’t be replaced. Fix them and upload again
• If the upload succeeds, the new list replaces the old one for that property, so always include every link you want disavowed, not just the new ones

4. The waiting game

Like anything in SEO, things take time. Google’s disavow tool is no different. It can take a few weeks for Google to recrawl the linking pages and apply your list.

Don’t be alarmed if the disavowed links still show in the Links report. They will; the report lists what Google has found, not what it’s chosen to ignore.

Reverse the disavowal process

If you wish to reverse the disavowal, follow the steps below. However, if you want to replace an old list with a new one, you can skip these and just upload the new list.

• Visit the disavow links tool page
• Choose the property from the list
• Click Cancel Disavowals. This removes the disavow list for that property, and like an upload it can take a few weeks to take effect

Now you know

We hope this article helps guide you in the right direction. Seeing lots of “toxic” backlinks can be quite stressful at first, but there’s power in knowledge! As you now know, disavowing backlinks is a relatively easy process, and more often than not, the right move is to leave the tool alone.

If you’re still unsure about doing it yourself, or you’d like someone to look at your link profile first, get in touch with the GRA team.