How to Disavow Backlinks in Google Search Console (Beginner's Guide)

Trying to figure out how to disavow backlinks in Google Search Console to get rid of junk links? 🤔

Overall, most of the time, you’re probably focused on attracting backlinks to grow your site. But at the same time, most low-quality backlinks are ignored by Google, while manipulative or artificial backlinks can still cause problems in some situations.

When you disavow backlinks, you’re essentially asking Google to ignore those links to your site and not factor them into its ranking algorithms.

By getting rid of spammy/negative links, you can help address backlink patterns that could lead to a manual penalty.

In this post, you’ll learn how to properly disavow backlinks using Google Search Console.

Let’s get into it!

📚 Table of contents:

Why you might want to disavow links
How to find which links to disavow
How to disavow links
1. Create your disavow backlinks .txt file
2. Submit the file via Search Console
How to stop disavowing links

Beginner's guide: how to disavow #backlinks in Google Search Console #GSC 🔗 ⛔

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📺 Video Tutorial

Why you might want to disavow backlinks

I’ll keep this brief because you’re probably looking for the tutorial. If you are, just click here to jump ahead to the parts where I show you how to actually put together your disavow link file and submit it to Google.

But if you found this post because you’re not sure whether or not you even need to care about disavowing links, then here’s a quick rundown on when you might want to do so.

📌 The basic idea is this:

Good backlinks move your site up in search engines, but most spammy backlinks are simply ignored. The disavow tool is mainly for situations where you have a considerable number of artificial, manipulative, or low-quality links that could lead to a manual action.

Now, Google has gotten a lot better at understanding that most sites will naturally pick up spammy links from scrapers/autoposters and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you analyze your site with an SEO tool, you’ll probably see tons of these links as well, but that’s not necessarily a situation where you need to do anything.

With that being said, there are a few scenarios in which you still might want to disavow links:

Manual action risk – if your site has a lot of spammy or artificial links pointing to it and those links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action, disavowing them can make sense.
Previous link building you regret – maybe your site is doing fine but you’re still worried about manipulative links you built or paid for in the past and can’t get removed.
Suspicious link patterns that you can’t clean up manually – if you believe a large number of unnatural links are pointing at your site and you can’t remove them yourself, disavowing can be a cleanup step.

If you want to hear Google’s take on the matter, Google recommends disavowing backlinks when both of these conditions are true:

Your site has tons of spammy and/or artificial links pointing to it.
The links have caused a manual action or are likely to cause a manual action.

How to find which backlinks to disavow

Before you can disavow backlinks in Google Search Console, you first need to choose which links you want to disavow and then assemble them into a text file.

Before you add anything to that file, it’s a good idea to try removing unnatural links manually first. For example, if the links come from a site you control, a directory listing you can edit, or a paid placement you can ask to have taken down, do that before turning to the disavow tool.

You have two options for disavowing backlink sources:

You can enter a specific URL to disavow backlinks from just that page. For example, targeting site.com/spam-post would remove links from that page but not any links from site.com/cool-post.
You can target entire domains to disavow all backlinks from anywhere on that site. For example, targeting site.com would disavow every single backlink that’s coming from site.com, including site.com/spam-post AND site.com/cool-post as well.

You cannot disavow a subpath – your only options are to target individual URLs or entire domains.

A good place to start is Google Search Console’s Links report, which lets you review and export known backlinks for your site. From there, you can use third-party SEO tools to dig deeper and prioritize which links might actually need review.

The easiest way to expand that review is by using one of the many SEO research tools, such as:

Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Semrush Backlink Audit (read our Semrush review to learn more)
Moz Link Explorer
WebCEO toxic link checker

All those services have tools that will let you see your site’s backlinks. You can then usually filter by “spamminess” to only find negative backlinks.

For small-scale stuff, you might not need a tool. For example, if you just want to get rid of backlinks from a single domain, you don’t need a tool because Google lets you exclude an entire domain name.

One important note for beginners: don’t treat every strange-looking link as something you need to disavow. Scraper sites, auto-generated pages, and random low-value mentions are often best left alone unless they’re part of a larger manipulative pattern.

How to disavow backlinks in Google Search Console

Now, let’s get into the step-by-step guide for how to disavow backlinks using Google Search Console.

💡 For this tutorial, I’ll assume that you’ve already verified your site with Google Search Console. If you haven’t yet, follow our guide to Google Search Console verification and then come back here once you’ve verified your site.

1. Create your disavow backlinks .txt file

To begin, you’ll want to assemble all the backlinks that you want to disavow into a .txt file.

You’ll put each disavow rule in its own line.

To target individual pages, paste the full URL to the page, including the HTTPS part.

To target entire domains, use this format: domain:spammysite.com

Here’s an example of what the .txt file should look like – this would disavow backlinks from three specific pages and two domains:

https://spamexample.com/stuff/comments.html
https://spamexample.com/stuff/paid-links.html
https://shadylinkseller.com/pbn/spam/
domain:shadyseo.com
domain:spammysite.com

Here are some other important details about the .txt file:

The filename must end in .txt. You cannot use other formats.
Make sure to encode the file in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.
The maximum file size is 100,000 lines, including blank lines and comments. This means you can disavow up to 100,000 links/domains. There’s also a 2 MB max file size.
You can include comments by using the # mark. Google will ignore these, but you might find them useful while working on the file.

2. Submit .txt file via Google Search Console

Once you have your disavow link file, click here to go to the Google Search Console disavow links tool.

Then, select your website (“property”) from the drop-down.

Finally, click the Upload disavow list button to upload the disavow backlinks file you created in the previous step:

Once you upload the file, the links should appear in the interface, and you’re all done. If you’ve previously disallowed any backlinks for this site, uploading this new list will replace the existing one.

Important notes about the disavow links tool

The disavow list only applies to the specific property that you chose, so it’s important to upload it to the correct property in Search Console.

Google’s disavow tool uses URL-prefix properties, not Domain properties. If you’ve only verified a Domain property in Search Console, you’ll need to add the relevant URL-prefix property or properties before uploading your file.

Additionally, any subpaths under the property are covered, but the exact scope depends on the URL-prefix property you upload to. Because of that, don’t assume one upload covers every protocol or host variation of your site unless those variations are included in the property you’re using.

The easiest way to avoid mistakes here is to double-check the exact property selected in the disavow tool before you upload your file.

3. Wait a few weeks

The disavow backlinks tool does not work instantly. Once your upload is successful, you’ll need to wait a few weeks for Google to start factoring this information into its rankings.

How to stop disavowing backlinks in Google Search Console

If you feel that you made a mistake and you no longer want to disavow some/all of the backlinks that you uploaded, Google lets you cancel your backlink disavows.

To do this, open the disavow links tool page. Then, select your website from the drop-down and click Cancel Disavowals.

Again, it will take a few weeks for your changes to take effect, so you won’t notice an immediate change.

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Disavow those spammy backlinks today!

If you’ve built spammy backlinks that you regret or you’re dealing with a large number of manipulative links that you can’t remove manually, you might want to disavow those backlinks to avoid problems with Google, especially if you’re worried about a manual action.

Beginner's guide: how to disavow #backlinks in Google Search Console #GSC 🔗 ⛔

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Thankfully, Google makes this easy. All you need to do is create a .txt file with the pages or domains for which you want to disavow backlinks. Then, you can upload that list to Google Search Console and Google will stop factoring those links into your site’s rankings after a few weeks.

For some other ways to improve your site’s SEO, check out these posts:

🎁 We also have a guide that shows you how to attract high-quality backlinks that you won’t need to disavow.

Do you still have any questions about how or why to disavow backlinks? Let us know in the comments!