And it turns out Disavow does work after all 😁
An interesting statement from John Mueller.
On Reddit, people were discussing a case where a website’s rankings dropped after some links were added to Disavow. And, as usual, a debate began about how this tool is no longer needed by anyone and doesn’t actually have any effect.
To which Mueller replied:
“It has its place & time, it does have effects.”
In other words, Disavow has its place and time, and it does have an effect.
And that’s interesting.
Because for years, we’ve been hearing from Google that most websites don’t need Disavow. Mueller himself has repeatedly said that SEOs often waste their time on it. Back in March of this year, he said again: most websites don’t need Disavow, but not all of them.
And now, even more specifically—the tool does have an effect.
However, here’s an important point: Mueller did NOT say that Disavow specifically caused the website to drop in this case.
On the contrary, he noted that rejecting a few links shouldn’t knock a site out of search results. He advised checking the Disavow file itself, but also looking for other causes—such as a Spam Update or serious technical issues.
So there’s no sensational claim here like “Disavow is causing sites to drop in rankings.”
But what’s interesting to me is something else.
Not long ago, there was active debate about whether this tool was even necessary. Mueller even said that Google would likely remove it at some point.
But now we have a pretty clear answer:
Disavow is effective, and it still has its time and place.

But as for exactly when and where—Google, as always, has left it up to SEOs to figure out for themselves 😁
So I definitely wouldn’t rush to write off Disavow just yet. But I also wouldn’t rush to disavow everything that Ahrefs has labeled as toxic.
#SEO #Google #Disavow #LinkBuilding #SEOTools

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