Google disavow link tool will go away at some point

Google may do away with the disavow link tool within Google Search Console in the future. John Mueller, a Senior Search Analyst at Google, said on X, “At some point, I’m sure we’ll remove it,” referring to the disavow link tool.

What Google said. John Mueller responded to questions about the disavow tool, suggesting again that most sites do not need to use the feature. Here are those posts:

Bing removed it. Earlier this year, Bing Webmaster Tools removed their disavow link tool. Back then Fabrice Canel from Microsoft explained that the disavow links tool is no longer needed now that the Bing Search algorithms are great at figuring out which links to count and which ones to ignore. “Times have changed, and so has our technology,” Canel wrote.

More. Google added the disavow link tool back in October 2012, then migrated to the new Google Search Console interface in 2020. Back then we explained why one would want to use this tool:

 If you are concerned that you have bad links pointing to your site that may end up hurting your site’s performance in Google Search, you can give Google a list of URLs or domains you would like Google to ignore. This can be done for manual actions but likely is not needed, according to Google, for algorithmic issues since Google primarily just ignores bad links, as opposed penalizes for them algorithmically.

“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links, or if you think that you’re about to get one because of paid links or link schemes that violate our quality guidelines, ask the other site to remove those links,” said Google. “If you can’t get these links removed, then disavow those sites using this tool.”

Why we care. There are many SEOs who spend time disavowing links in Google Search Console. If and when Google drops the link disavow tool from Google Search Console, SEOs will no longer need to be busy with that task. Truth is, most SEOs probably should not be spending much time on this task at this point based on the communication Google has been providing over the past few years.