Google Disavow Tool Still Relevant for Manual Penalties

The Google Disavow tool has been around since 2012 to help websites exclude spammy backlinks that can't be removed.

However, link-related penalties have become rare in recent years, leading some search optimizers to question the tool's value.

According to John Mueller, Google's advice is to use Disavow only if a site has incurred a manual penalty for unnatural links or if there's a potential for such a penalty due to paid links or other link schemes that violate Google's spam policies.

The tool was initially effective in recovering from penalties triggered by the 'Penguin' update, but since 2016, Penguin has been part of the core algorithm and only devalues spam signals without affecting whole-site rankings.