On July 26, 2024, I exported all “toxic” and “potentially toxic” backlinks to our three blog posts from a well-known SEO tool. There are a total of 129 URLs, which I found in Google Search Console.
After refusing, traffic (as reported by GSC) decreased by 7.1%:
Side note.
Google started rolling out the Core Update on August 15th, so I reduced the experiment to just 20 days. My plan was to leave it running for a full month, but I’m just shy of three weeks enough time to see results anyway.
Before the decline, according to GSC, the traffic to the post was trending quite up:
After refusing? Slightly lower:
However, Ahrefs’ organic traffic estimates tell a slightly different story. Visibility is slightly reduced previous deny…
… and next deny:
I asked Patrick Stox how he would interpret this. Here’s what he said:
I’ll look at the Ahrefs data here. The average search volume on Ahrefs will show that it affects rankings and visibility, although our data may be slower to update than GSC. GSC can have seasonality, luck, etc.., so that it is not consistent in size.
Makes sense. In this case, it looks like disavowing has no effect on overall ranking/visibility. But let’s take a closer look at the data…
Glass test
The data above is for all three pages combined, so let’s see what happens on each page individually.
This page exists our SEO price guide.
For the 20-day period before the disavow, the post got 574 organic visits. This is down 12% to 505 visits in the next 20 days (when disavow occurs).
Before the decline, the organic traffic to this post averaged:
After rejecting it, it’s still flatlining:
Ahrefs data tells a slightly different story…
Before disavowing, estimate organic traffic as a trend quite down:
After rejecting it, it’s flatlining:
Long story short? refuse can have a small positive effect, but I believe it is more likely that the long downward trend will only eventually level off.
This page exists list of top YouTube searches.
For the 20-day period before the disavow, the post got 291 organic visits. This is down 8.25% to 267 visits in the next 20 days (when disavow occurs).
Before declining, organic traffic to that post is up:
After declining, the trend is down:
Ahrefs data tells a similar story…
Before you decline, the estimated organic traffic is up:
After declining, the trend is down:
The results look pretty clear: disavowing is likely to have a negative impact-especially with the big drop in traffic about ten days after.
This page exists list of our top Bing searches.
For the 20-day period before the disavow, the post got 156 organic visits. This increased by 12.82% to 176 visits in the next 20 days (when the disavow occurred).
Before you decline, organic traffic to this post is up:
After disavowing, it’s still trending up:
Ahrefs tells a slightly different story here…
Before we argue, let’s say traffic is trending very (very slightly!) down:
After disavowing, same story:
Become, disavowing seems to have little or no impact here…
What does all this mean?
My interpretation of these results is that getting rid of “toxic backlinks” does nothing. It seems a bit painful one page, perhaps rather help others, and not impact on others.
In short, blindly disavowing “toxic backlinks” reported by SEO tools is unlikely to have a positive impact—at least according to our data.
Is this a surprise? Not really. Google already said this quite eternally:
That said, even if the most likely outcome of disavowing is nothing, it’s still risky. Removing “toxic backlinks” can hurt your traffic, as John’s reply on Reddit illustrates:
What this means is disavowing it always bad idea? Not. If you already have manual penalties for unnatural links or too many manipulative links (for example, paid links), you should disavow them.
Google recommends this…
You should reject backlinks only if:
You have a lot of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
AND
These links lead to manual action, or are likely to lead to manual action, on your site.
… and also Marie Haynes:
There are two situations where we would recommend to our clients a full link audit and then file a disavow:
- The site has a manual action for unnatural links in GSC.
- The site has such a large number of links that we feel the webspam team would consider it “manipulative”.
If that’s not you, then rejecting “toxic backlinks” – especially those reported by SEO tools – is probably not the best idea or use of your time. As Marie Haynes says, it can’t possibly be toxic:
I’ve found that links that are truly toxic…the ones that have the potential to damage your site algorithmically are rarely returned by SEO tools.
That said, many SEOs disagree with this advice and believe that disagreeing with “toxic backlinks” helps. If you and you are seeing good results from disavowing, fantastic! Don’t let me stop you 🙂
For others, it’s not the best idea…
This isn’t the first time we’ve learned about this. My friend Patrick disavowed entire link to three similar posts in 2021—and traffic is falling off a cliff:
We’re not specifically rejecting “toxic” backlinks here, but those links clearly still help page rankings. If an SEO tool mistakenly labels some useful links as “toxic” and you reject them, it can hurt your traffic.
My advice? Spending time to improve SEO, not disavowing “poisonous backlinks” can actually help you!
Have a question? disagree? Ping me on LinkedIn (or X if you insist!)
