I Disowned “Toxic Backlinks”: Here’s What Happened

On July 26, 2024, I exported all of the “toxic” and “potentially toxic” backlinks to three of our blog posts from a well-known SEO tool. There were a total of 129 URLs that I disowned in Google Search Console.

After being rejected, traffic (according to GSC data) fell by 7.1%:

According to GSC, traffic to these posts was a trend before the retraction slightly up:

After rejection? A little down:

However, Ahrefs organic traffic estimates tell a slightly different story. Visibility is trending slightly down before renunciation…

…And After renunciation:

I asked Patrick Stox how he would interpret this. Here’s what he said:

Personally, I would look at Ahrefs data here. The average search volume in Ahrefs will show whether it has affected rankings and visibility, although our data may be slower to update than GSC. GSC can be subject to seasonality, luck, etc., so it’s not as consistent a measurement.

Makes sense. In this case, it looks like this the rejection had no impact on overall rankings/visibility. But let’s take a closer look at the data…

Test pages

The above data is for all three pages combined. So let’s look at what happened to each page separately.

This page contains our SEO pricing guide.

In the 20 days prior to disavow, the post received 574 organic visits. That number dropped 12% to 505 visits in the next 20 days (when disavow was implemented).

Before I pulled out, organic traffic to this post was steady:

After dismissing the allegations, the situation remains flat:

Ahrefs data tells a slightly different story…

Before exclusion, estimated organic traffic was trending slightly downward:

After rejection, the situation is flat:

In miniature? Renunciation power had a petite positive impact, but I think it’s more likely that the long-term downtrend is simply finally stabilizing.

On this page you will find our list of the most popular searches on YouTube.

In the 20 days prior to the disavow, the post received 291 organic visits. This dropped 8.25% to 267 visits in the next 20 days (while the disavow was in effect).

Before the idea was abandoned, organic traffic to the post was trending upwards:

After rejecting this information, the trend is downward:

Ahrefs data tells the same story…

Organic traffic was trending upwards before the estimates were withdrawn:

After rejection, the trend is down:

The results seem pretty clear: the renunciation probably had a negative impact—especially since estimated traffic dropped about ten days later.

This page lists the most popular searches on Bing.

In the 20 days prior to the disavow, the post received 156 organic visits. This increased by 12.82% to 176 visits in the next 20 days (while the disavow was in effect).

Before I pulled out, organic traffic to this post was trending upwards:

After withdrawing this theory, the trend continues to grow:

Ahrefs tells a slightly different story here…

Before pulling this data, estimated traffic was showing a slight (really slight!) downward trend:

After rejection, the story is the same:

So, renunciation seemed to have little or no effect here…

What does this all mean?

My interpretation of these results is that disabling “toxic backlinks” did basically nothing. It seemed to hurt one site a little, Maybe lend a hand someone else slightly, but have no influence on him.

In miniature, uncritically rejecting “toxic backlinks” reported by SEO tools is unlikely to yield any positive results — at least according to our data.

Is that a surprise? No, no. Google was saying it’s almost forever:

That said, while the most likely outcome of disapproval is essentially nothing, it’s definitely still risky. Disapproving “toxic backlinks” can hurt your traffic, as this response to John on Reddit shows:

Does this mean that renunciation is Always bad idea? No. If you already have a manual penalty for unnatural links or a very gigantic number of manipulative links (e.g. paid links), then you should definitely deny it.

Google recommends it…

You should only disapprove backlinks if:

There are a significant number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links leading to your site,

AND

The links have resulted in, or will likely result in, manual actions being taken on your site.

…and the same Marie Haynes:

There are two situations where we recommend our clients to conduct a thorough link audit and then submit a link disabling request:

• The site has implemented a manual action to remove unnatural links in GSC.
• The page contains a very gigantic number of links that we believe the Internet Spam Team would consider to be “manipulative.”

If that’s not the case for you, then dissing “toxic backlinks” — especially those flagged by SEO tools — is probably not the best idea or employ of your time, according to Marie Haynes he saidand so unlikely to be truly toxic:

I find that truly toxic links, the kind that could potentially harm your site algorithmically, are rarely returned by an SEO tool.

However, many SEOs disagree with this advice and are convinced that disabling “toxic backlinks” helps. If that’s you and you see good results from disabling, great! Don’t let me stop you 🙂

For everyone else, this probably isn’t the best idea…

This is not the first time we have investigated this. My colleague Patrick has denied All Links to the same three posts already in 2021 — and traffic plummeted:

We haven’t specifically disallowed “toxic” backlinks here, but the links clearly still lend a hand pages rank. If an SEO tool mistakenly marks some of these helpful links as “toxic” and you disallow them, it could hurt your traffic.

My advice? Spend time improving your SEO, not discarding “toxic backlinks” that could actually lend a hand you!

Have questions? Disagree? Ping me LinkedIn (Or X if you insist!)