How to audit your backlinks and when to disavow links

The site works and traffic flows, until someone tells you that you have toxic links and that you must disavow them right away. Before touching anything, you need to audit backlinks: read your link profile with Google's own data and check whether the diagnosis is real.

What auditing your backlinks means (and what it does not)

An audit of your links is inventory and signal reading: who links to you, with what anchor text and from where. Disavowing is something else: a documented exception for one very specific case. Confusing the two is the source of almost every mistake.

The official position: "In most cases, Google can determine which links you should trust, so it is not necessary to use this tool on almost any site."

Google publishes no toxicity score: toxic score, DA/DR or spam score are third-party metrics, not search engine signals.

An audit is for seeing who links to you, spotting patterns that do match what Google penalizes and, above all, deciding to do nothing with good reason.

The Links report: what it shows and what it does not

The starting point is the Links report in Search Console: "See which sites link to yours the most, your most linked pages, and other useful information." It splits into External links and Internal links.

Before drawing conclusions, know its limits:

• "This report is not a complete list of all links to your site. It presents a sample of internal and external links."
• "Tables can show a maximum of 1,000 rows", so they get truncated on large or highly linked sites.
• Data is grouped by root domain: subdomains and subdirectories are merged, so you will see example.com, not blog.example.com.
• "The report does not specify whether a link is marked nofollow."

The fine-grained work is in the export: Export downloads up to 100,000 rows, with the options "Latest links" (by discovery date) and "More sample links".

How to read your link profile without panicking

With the export in hand, look for patterns, not single links: unknown domains appearing out of nowhere, the same exact anchor text repeated across hundreds of links. The Manual actions report suggests starting with "sites that link most frequently to yours, or ones that were created recently (in the last few months)".

Google already filters part of the noise: "We tend to ignore links in known spammy content, but we recommend that you remove or disavow them anyway." Honest reading: a handful of isolated junk links moves no rankings.

First things first: is there a manual action?

It is the only data point that justifies urgency: "you can see how many manual actions have been applied to your site at the top of the report", under Security and manual actions. The links action is called "Unnatural links to your site": "Google has detected a pattern of artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to your site."

Without a manual action there is nothing to lift: the audit is monitoring, not rescue. For the bigger picture: how to use Google Search Console, how to avoid Google penalties and how to recover from a Google penalty.

Remove before you disavow: the order is not negotiable

When the manual action concerns links, the official procedure is this:

1. Download the list from Search Console ("Top linking sites > Export").
2. Cross-check every case against Google's spam policies.
3. "Contact the site owner and ask them to remove the links, or to prevent them from passing PageRank; for example with a rel=nofollow attribute or a more specific one."
4. Only what you cannot remove goes on the disavow list.

Link spam is "the practice of creating links to or from a site mainly to manipulate search rankings". Examples the policy lists: buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, using automated programs to create links and forum comments with links in the signature.

There is an exception hardly anyone applies: "These links are not considered a violation of our policies as long as they are qualified with a rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored attribute in the a tag." For a paid link, the right move is usually to qualify it, not to delete it. The guide on qualifying outbound links confirms it: nofollow used to be recommended, sponsored is now. The detail is in the nofollow tag.

When to use disavow (and when not to)

The requirement is double: "You should only disavow inbound links in the following situations: there are many fraudulent, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site. And those links have caused, or are very likely to cause, a manual action on your site."

The "And" is a conjunction: both conditions must hold at once. That dismantles the "just in case" approach, because the same page concludes that "it is not necessary to use this tool on almost any site". The English version adds a warning: "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google Search results."

Cases where it does not apply: isolated junk links, doing it as a precaution, wiping out a whole domain that links to you a lot, or trying to rank higher: disavowing gains you nothing, it only withdraws trust.

The disavow file: format and upload

The file has strict rules: "Include a URL or domain you want to disavow on each line. You cannot disavow entire subpaths, such as example.com/en/." For a whole domain or subdomain, "prefix the value domain:". It must be plain text in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, with a .txt extension, URLs under 2,048 characters, and a maximum of 100,000 lines and 2 MB.

# Two pages to disavow
http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
# One domain to disavow
domain:suspiciousseo.com

On upload: only owners can submit lists; a new list replaces the previous one; disavowed links keep appearing in the Links report; the list applies only to that property and its secondary ones (with http and https you need one for each); and Google may take weeks to incorporate it into the index.

Watch out for one trap: "The disavow links tool does not support domain properties." If your property is that type, you will need a URL-prefix one; we explain it in Search Console platform properties. And you can start from the export: "Remove from the downloaded file all the URLs you do not want to disavow".

The mistakes that sink a review (and a reconsideration)

The manual actions documentation is uncompromising:

• "If you can remove an inbound link, make the effort to remove it first. Blindly adding all inbound links to the disavow file will not be considered a good-faith effort and will not be enough to get your reconsideration request approved."
• "Make sure you do not disavow organic links pointing to your site."
• "If you only disavow inbound links without trying to remove them first, your request may be rejected."

And three myths to bury: that every bad link is toxic and must be cleaned (the scores are not Google's); that disavowing is reversible and free (it takes weeks and, done badly, can hurt you); and that disavowing the whole domain is enough (you can take down links that were working).

Closing the loop: measure and, if needed, request review

If there was a manual action, once you finish "go to the Manual actions report and select Request review" and "include documentation about the links you managed to remove and an explanation of those you could not". Honest timelines: "in most cases, reconsideration requests can take anywhere from several days to several weeks".

If there was no manual action, the audit is monitoring. Review the Links report when your strategy changes or after a traffic drop in Google, not every week. And measure with data: compare the performance report before and after.

Checklist: how to audit your backlinks step by step

1. Open Manual actions first: with no links action, there is no urgency.
2. Go to the Links report > External links and sort by "Top linking sites".
3. Export (up to 100,000 rows) and work on the spreadsheet, not on the table.
4. Flag unknown domains and repeated exact anchor text.
5. Cross-check every case against the spam policy before labelling it.
6. For paid links, the fix is rel=sponsored (or nofollow), not deletion.
7. Contact the owner and document the attempt before disavowing.
8. Use domain: for whole domains and one URL per line, never subpaths.
9. Confirm the property is not a domain property, upload the .txt and wait weeks.

A backlink audit almost never ends in disavowing: it ends in understanding where your links come from. If you want the other side of the work, start with what backlinks are and domain authority.