Google Disavow Tool in effect treats your links as Removed

[engine]

According to one of John Mueller's latest hangouts it seems, unless you have a manual action against your site, you can stop worrying as don't have to actually remove links to your site if you've used the disavow tool. The disavow submission will, in effect, from Google's point of view, give the desired result. Of course, those links will still be on the net, so, if you really want to be squeaky clean, it still ought to be cleaned up.

A manual action will require those links to be disavowed, and removed.

The video starts at 43:20

[aristotle]

Using disavow is better than attempting actual removal in several ways:

1. Preparing and submitting a disavow list consumes far less time.

2. No matter what you do, there are usually many backlinks that you can't get removed, but you can always disavow them.

3. Even if you disavow a backlink, it potentially could still send you traffic, but not if it's removed.

4. Submitting a disavow list to Google has no effect on your Bing rankings and traffic, but getting backlinks removed could.

[lucy24]

Even if you disavow a backlink, it potentially could still send you traffic

But if a link results in actual human traffic, why would you need or want to disavow it? Seems like if you discover that you've got content that's attractive to real humans at horrible-loathsome-repugnant-site dot com, bad SERPs could be the least of your problems.

:: irritably wondering why obligatory lookup of obviously spurious names always sends Camino into an irreversible coma ::

[aristotle]

Well Lucy, in the past some people created backlinks through guest blogging, paid directory submissions, article sites, forum posts, etc, mainly in hopes of boosting their Google rankings, because at one time some of those sites were "semi-respectable", and it was also possible that links on those types of sites might send you a little traffic. But after Penguin and unnatural backlink manual penalties appeared, some people began disavowing those backlinks because they were artificially created, even though they might still send a little traffic.

[GreyBeard123]

But after Penguin and unnatural backlink manual penalties appeared, some people began disavowing those backlinks because they were artificially created, even though they might still send a little traffic.

And some haven’t got a clue and disavow more than they should

[engine]

When the disavow tool was originally announced it came with a warning that it should be used with caution. Anyone not heeding that advice should take their own chances.

Will some of these links send traffic if it's flagged by Google? The chances are that the link is less likely to send quality traffic as it's been flagged by google as a suspect link, and is unlikely to rank well. Any traffic from that may decline over time as the SERPs don't show those bad neighbourhoods, unless the link is in some kind of network. If it's in a link network, you take your chances, as far is Google is concerned. As a site owner, if you're getting adequate traffic from elsewhere, other than google, you can ignore the penalty and just carry on. Although, ignoring it is not good practice, especially if google is a valuable traffic driver to the site.

If you rely on google traffic, try and remove the links. If that fails, the last resort is the disavow tool, used with care and caution.

[Planet13]

I have absolutely no proof whatsoever, but I would tend to think that google doesn't have any sort of "punishment" in place for sites that have been listed in a disavow file.

Otherwise, I would put a listing in my disavow file like this:

domain:my_competitors_site.com

(even if they don't have a link to me.)

Or might even try something like this:

domain:awesome_site_that_links_to_my_competitor_but_not_me.com

In short, I am going to bet that google realizes allowing the disavow file to be a sort of compass for finding bad neighborhoods would be the first step in the ultimate negative SEO Armageddon, and that they have taken precautions.

I mean, if they find that bounce rate is too noisy a signal to use for ranking, then certainly the disavow file would be a lot worse...

People can say I have drank the Kool-aid, but I tend to believe them when they say that all the disavow file does is add little "noindex" tags to the backlinks to your site which you disavow.

~~~~

On another note:

The disavow tool is SLOW! More rightly, the process that uses the disavow tool is slow.

A link that you disavow may only be crawled once every 6 months or a year. And my understanding is that the disavow is NOT retroactive to previously crawled links: it only applies to links that are crawled while the disavow is in place.

And I suspect it is possible that a link will have to be crawled MORE THAN ONCE while a disavow is in place for it to actually register as a noindex link.

So if google bot needs to crawl a link more than once (sheer speculation on my part) to "register" it as disavowed, and it might only crawl that link once every several months, then that might explain the extremely long Penguin recovery times.