Disavow without a manual penalty?

[Dani]

Does it ever make sense to disavow links if you think you've been affected by Google Penguin-type stuff in a core algorithm update, but don't have, and never had, any manual penalties?

[bijutoha]

When Penguin first came out, I disavowed several links, and more recently (post-2023), I did the same for a client. I still think it makes sense in some cases.

If you’ve got a messy backlink profile or notice traffic drops after an update, disavowing can be a way to clean things up. Sometimes it’s just a matter of telling Google, I don’t like this junk either — please ignore it.

We know, Google’s better now at ignoring spammy links, and sure, the disavow tool shouldn’t be overused — but if you’re working on a small or traffic-dependent site, it’s worth taking a closer look. Just be careful not to accidentally nuke good links.

To me, disavow isn’t dead; it just needs to be used with some common sense.

[Dani]

In our case, years ago we used to have a bug in our system where if you went to a specific page and passed in a ?url= query string parameter, that URL appeared on the page. The page in question was always disallowed via robots.txt, and the bug only existed for a couple of weeks before it was detected. Nevertheless, that was enough time for a bot to start linking to that page (with all different ?url= parameters) across thousands upon thousands upon thousands of spammy webpages. In other words, they would supposedly get a backlink from us to spammy page A and link to the page with the backlink from spammy page B.

The folder has always not been seen by Google because it's been robots.txt'ed on our end, but Google does see these thousands and thousands of spammy links to a non-crawlable section of our site. Soooo I used Ahrefs to disavow as many of those spammy pages as I was able to discover.

I asked a long time ago if anyone has any experience with whether Google counts links to non-crawlable pages, but wasn't really able to get much of a straight answer.

[bijutoha]

That's a unique and complicated situation you've described, Dani!

Although those pages were blocked with robots.txt, I’ve heard that Google can still see the links if they’re found elsewhere — they just don’t crawl them. So yes, disavowing seems like a wise decision in your case, especially with that volume. Better to be safe than sorry, honestly. Thanks for the detailed explanation!