29 Critical Myths That You Need to Know Before Doing a Google Disavow

Probably you are familiar with the story of the two English salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back home. And one of them wrote: “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other one wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”  There’s a similar situation when it comes to The Disavow  Tool also, because there are some people who think that it’s an overrated tool, worthless to use, and there are some others who think they ain’t seen nothing yet. What both categories of people have in common, are myths:  The stories woven around this tool which appear when imagination and groundless extrapolation are stronger than knowledge. As JF Kennedy quoted, “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

In a previous article, we put all together some great experts’ opinions about the biggest disavow myths of all. We then realized that a Disavow Mythology needs to be done, therefore we’ve dug in everywhere we could, we’ve made some serious research and we’ve tried to make a comprehensive list of myths regarding the Disavow Tool, as a follow-up of the previous article.

Without any other introduction, let’s meet the biggest myths of all:

1. The Disavow Process is Not Automatic. A Manual Inspection Is Done.

There has been some speculation that the disavow tool is not really the result of automated processes, but rather that every time it is  used, a manual inspection is preformed. Aside from the fact that this would actually mean a lot more work for Google, it has actually been confirmed that the disavow process is fully automatic and there is no need to follow-up with a reconsideration request. The disavow tool is “automatic for any algorithmic rankings (such as Penguin and Panda)”,supposedly said  Matt Cutts himself on a thread from more than a year and a half ago. Of course, reconsideration requests remain an option for manual webspam action, but only after you’ve first tried to take it down yourself. The disavow tool, however, leaves nothing for manual processing, which is probably why it’s always subject to extreme caution.

2. Someone Could Use the Disavow Tool to Harm Your Site.

The answer to the question of wheather somebody could use the disavow tool to harm your site is as short and straightforward as it can be: NO.
Why? Because one would need access to your Google Webmaster Tool account in order to submit a disavow on your behalf.

3. Google Disavow Does Not Work on Penguin Penalties

The Disavow Tool is not a link cure-all that will propel your site into new heights of ranking and traffic. Yet, it’s purpose is pretty clear : to help you solve unnatural links issues by asking Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. As Google itself states,  if you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.

Furthermore, the Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties.

4. Disavowed Links Disappear from GWT

Just like when you unsubscribe from unsolicited mail, once you disavow a link you should stop seeing or hearing about it altogether, right? Sort of. At any rate, Google will pretend not to see it from that moment on (by basically sticking an invisible nofollow tag to the link). The link, however, will not just disappear into thin air and you will still be able to see it in the Google Web Toolkit (remember that it’s the Disavow, not the Delete tool). So at a very basic level, there might not be any discernable difference, but that is no reason to panic. Just because you’re not seeing any visible change, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any.

5. You Can Disavow an Unlimited Number of Links

Of course, not all myths doubt the power of the Disavow tool. A few are somewhat exaggerating it. Like the myth about being able to disavow an unlimited number of links. Admittedly, this is a more subtle point. While there is no specific limit to the number of links you can disavow, there is a 2 megabyte size limit on the disavow file. Which, in fairness, is pretty much all you should need given that the tool should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. After all, a 2 megabyte limit is still the equivalent of about 1000 full pages of text. If you need to disavow that many links, maybe your problems are more serious than can be tackled by this tool.

6. The Webspam Team Reads All the Comments in Your Disavow File

This would sort of make sense. If there was a team who read the comments. Meaning there would be some manual part of the process. But this, as we saw earlier, is not what happens. The process is fully automatic, so even if you might see examples of disavow files containing comments, be aware that those comments are not meant for Google to read and act upon. Rather, they are useful for yourself, should you want to make sense of the file later on, or even edit the file. Why edit? Well, basically because our next myth is false as well.

7. Disavowed Links Can Not be Reavowed

There are a number of reasons why you might want to “re-avow” a link: maybe you disavowed it by mistake in the first place, maybe you changed your mind about a particular link, or maybe you simply have something else in mind and need the link to be crawled again. Regardless of reasons, re-avowing is fairly easy to do: simply remove the link from the file and re-upload the file. Next time Google visits the link, it will count towards your PageRank again. But before you remove a link from the disavow list, you might want to make sure that you really mean it. Because if the link still looks unnatural to Google, you might just get penalized again. And a second penalty round from Google is much like a second penalty round by the criminal system in real life: it usually takes longer to reclaim the lost trust. The best example of a scenario in which it would be advisable to take advantage of this feat would be if you had disavowed an entire domain but not all of it was bad. Your best course of action would be, if you know exactly which links are bad, to remove the domain name from the disavow list and only add back in the specific links you know are harming your site. Why throw away the whole crop just because of a few bad apples?

8. You Can’t Recover from a Penalty and then Delete Your Disavow File

If you are sure that your site has been hit with a manual penalty and you’re sure that penalty is link-based and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, you can certainly use the Disavow tool to recover. It may take up to a few months for Google to process your request of no follow, but if you prove Google that you have taken unsuccessful action in order to remove the bad links, recovery is on the horizon. One thing you may be tempted to do is to erase the disavow file once you recovered from a penalty. Bear in mind that as long as the links in the disavow still exist online, the removal of the disavow file makes you liable for a new penalty, once Google re-crawls the web and finds the same old links.

Basically, you can’t recover from a penalty and then delete your disavow file as Google keeps track of everything and will find out.

9. Google Disavow is Not Using the Uploads to Train the Algorithms 

Frequently, our efforts  are directed towards understanding algorithms. Yet, isn’t it possible that Google might do just the same? Meaning that it could “learn” from all the disavow lists and keep itself up to  date with  the newest “types” of unnatural links and link building schemes.  

10. Google Disavow Tool Will Not Hurt Your Rankings

The jury is still out on this one. There is not a lot of evidence, but what exists is an interesting experiment. Cyrus Shepard  at Moz disavowed all links to his personal website in the beginning of April 2013. Nothing happened in the following 2 months, but then in late May the rankings started to drop. Was this the effect of the Disavow tool? Hard to tell, since in the case of this particular experiment, late May of 2013 was also the time Google released Penguin 2.0, one of a handful of major updates made by Google for its ranking algorithms.

Shepard’s intuitive conclusion is that unless you file a reconsideration request right after using the disavow tool, you will not see any effects up until the first major algorithm update. Based strictly on his example, it might very well be true. It’s also true that he disavowed all the links to his website. What if he had disavowed only a few? Chances are that, taking all things into consideration, his rankings would not have dropped significantly. Shepard’s blog only dropped 8 positions for “seo blog” (not exactly an obscure phrase) after the disavow list entered into effect for all the links (assuming he was not liable for any Penguin 2.0 penalties). So if disavow really worked after Penguin 2.0, shouldn’t the drop have been a lot bigger? One theory that might still support this myth is that Google, in its own words, regards the disavow file as a “strong suggestion rather than a directive—Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment”.

Marie Haynes  takes this to potentially mean that if Google can actually distinguish between natural and unnatural links, then maybe it treats disavow files with caution and doesn’t disavow natural links. That would be a pretty big responsibility though, and not one that they might necessarily want to take upon themselves. Bottom line? Unless you’re disavowing all the links to your website, it is difficult to know what might happen (in the absence of Penguin or Panda update).

11. A Google Disavow Will Always Recover Your Rankings

If you have been hit by a manual action from Google, you are not necessarily going to return to were you were after the links are disavowed. If your site had an unnatural boost from those links, you are going to work a little bit harder to get natural links to recover. While Page Rank might not be the sole indicator of relevancy for Google, it is still a very important one. And you need to bear in mind that Page Rank is basically about the number and importance of links pointing to your site. Hey, they may not be links from The New York Times or Financial Times, but they still count, don’t they? Not if you disavow them. So, your rankings will be hurt, sure, but some traffic is better than no traffic at all.

Yet, it is actually very difficult to verify whether a Google Disavow will recover your rankings or not because there is so much more at play than just the links. Cyrus’ case , for instance, is difficult to assess because the disavow timeline is intertwined with that of the Penguin releases. Would the results have been different, had the disavow file been submitted after the Penguin release and only for some links (in Cyrus’ experiment)? That would have probably been a better scenario for testing this myth, but that is not what happened. Either way, if you dropped 4 positions in the ranking and you discover you have some unnatural links, you probably shouldn’t expect that putting those links on a disavow list will act like a magical Undo button to bring you back where you were in the beginning.

Yet, a successful disavow will bring you some boost in terms of rankings. If you were to be penalized and didn’t submit a disavow file, you would probably rank on Google’s pages that have more than two digits. A successful submitted disavow file will bring you back on the track and even if it won’t place you on the same position that you used to be, it will still give your site the possibility to grow and accede on higher positions.

12. A Reconsideration Request Is Required for the Google Disavow File to Be Processed

There is a theory amongst many people who have an extensive experience with disavowing links that the disavow will take effect only when a major change happens, such as the filing of a reconsideration request or a Penguin algorithm update.

This myth has been consistently denied  right by Google and employees, even when directly confronted with the question. The disavow tool documentation is pretty clear: “…this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see”. Other instances of Q&As with Google employee John Mueller include him stating time and time again that “as soon as you submit” the disavow, Google uses it when recrawling pages and that “it’s not something that is only run periodically”. But Shepard’s experiment seems to be replicated by other sites that disavowed links a few weeks before Penguin 2.0 but only saw significant effects after the update. These cases might shake Google’s statements initially, but at a closer look they are still inconclusive. For one thing, it is very likely that the sites really were affected by Penguin 2.0. For another, it is difficult to say what the effect should have been after the disavow – maybe it wasn’t as big as the site owners expected?

14. Disavow Preemptively All Links

Since Penguins, negative SEO has been the webmasters′ worst nightmare. Unethical webmasters started building unnatural linkbacks for their competition and Google has been accused of unfair penalties. This is where the Disavow tool came into play.

If you want to disavow links that can potentially harm your site, even though you haven′t seen any decline in traffic or rankings from Google, it is pretty understandable. Suspicious links should always be treated with caution and they must be taken care of immediately, before they actually have an effect on your rankings. As a general rule though, you don’t need to deal with unnatural links if you haven’t been involved in link building. If you notice a drop in rankings, don’t jump to conclusions. Give it a little time. Wait a day or two, they might recover. Bad linkbacks might not even be involved and you will have to dig deeper to discover the true reason behind the drop. But if you’re aware of things done in the past by you or someone on your behalf, it might be a good idea to clean it up.

Cyrus Shepard made an interesting experiment, in order to find out how much damage can one do to his/her own site using the Google Disavow tool. He disavowed every link pointing to his website (over 35,000 of them), with no reconsideration request being filed. After 2 months, nothing happened. No drop in traffic. It has been suggested that the tool has built-in safeguards that protect you from disavowing good links.

Where do you draw the line is really up to you. Still, it would not be a very good idea to preemptively disavow natural links that generate traffic and improve your rankings. Take a little time to check them all manually. It will be worthwhile on long term.

15. I Need to Disavow All TLDs for blogspot.com Unnatural Links

Actually, you don’t. What you should focus on and what you should disavow is the .com version of a blogspot page, as it is the canonical one. So, no need to worry about the .ca, .co.uk, etc. version.

And as every affirmation should be backed up with a strong argument, you can watch John Muller, Google’s representative talking about this in a hangout  last spring. He is stressing on blogger specifically. He mentions that there are all this TLDs for bloggers and depending on your location you will be redirected to your local version and all of these local versions have a rel canonical. If you find something problematic on your site or blog that you need to disavow and don’t want to be counted, you’d just need to submit the .com version instead of the local version because the local versions are set up to be the canonical versions.

So, long story short, such is the case, submit for disavow only the .com version of blogger.

16. I Don’t Need to Disavow Unnatural Links Coming From Deindexed Sites.

Although a simply Google search with the query “disavow deindexed site” will lead you to dozens of sites implying that this action would be simply worthless, we really recommend you disavowing unnatural links even if they are coming from deindexed sites. Why, you might ask. Well, first of all, even if a site gets removed from the search results completely, there is no certainty that that site won’t come back in rankings. And secondly, sometimes links from non-indexed pages can still be passing PageRank.

Therefore, disavowing unnatural links coming from deindexed site is a necessity, fact confirmed by Google representatives.

17. DMOZ is a Veridic Source! I Do Not Need to Disavow the Scraper DMOZ Sites.

DMOZ is indeed a veridic source. Yet, whether to disavow or not the DMOZ scraper sites, that’s another story. And quite an interesting one as the one creating a bit of confusion here are Google’s representatives themselves.

John Muller said initially  that Dmoz scrapers don’t need to be disavowed unless the original Dmoz link was an unnatural one. Yet, less than one year later from that statement, on Google’s Product Forums, topics such as Manual action because of DMOZ scrapers appeared which made us think more on this matter.

Yet, in March last year, when asked if do we need to disavow Dmoz scraper sites, Google’s representatives said a firmly “Yes”. John then stated that for the most part, the algorithm tries to recognize these scraper sites and ignore them. His answer is quite vague on this matter as he continues by saying that if “you see these as a problem, and you want to be sure that Google handles them right…then by all means just put them in a disavow file.”

Obviously there are a lot of things to be debated here, starting with Google’s conflicting and inconsistent answers. Yet, as it is better to be safe than sorry, if it is the case, DMOZ scraper sites should be included on the Disavow list.

18. GWT Links are Enough for a Google Disavow

From our experience, we are inclined to say that this is a myth and links coming from GWT are not enough. It is true that it depends on the size of the site also but Google is known for not reporting all links. We had a lot of stories from our customers saying that Google turned down the initial reconsideration request due to missing link. The interesting thing was that those links were not found in the GWT data.

Google says (or at least some of its representatives) that one should mainly concentrate on the links coming from Google Webmaster Tool and that’s about it. Yet, Google’s spokesman John Muller is a bit more cautious on this matter and states  that you can pretty much pull out the information you need from GWT but depending on the type of site you have and the size of your site and how you process your site’s links, maybe one of the third party tools makes it a little bit easier for you to get that information or to process that information.

When asked whether one should worry about links that cannot be found in the GWT, the same J. Muller responds that if you’re aware of a general pattern that you see visible in GWT […] then that’s something you’ll see a sample of in GWT and it still makes sense to clean up the bigger problem which you might not directly see in GWT. […] Using third party tools sometimes makes it easier.

It wouldn’t be the first time when Google is not acting according to its official position. We do recommend not relying on links coming from GWT as experience showed us different.

19. I Should Disavow 50% of My Unnatural Links and See What Happens.

Making a disavow file can really be a burden and a time consuming process. Yet, you have to correctly identify ALL the links that caused the penalty and you have to visit ALL of them to see what this is about in order for the disavowing process to be successful. The question should not be whether you should go from 60% unnatural links to 40% but rather cleaning up all unnatural links, as John Muller stated.

To make things a bit easier for you, in the case of a manual penalty, in the message you receive from Google you may be given some examples of problematic links. Don’t take those few examples as the source of your problem. They are only indicative and only disavowing them won’t solve your problem. These are just examples meant to give you a “flavour” of the types of links considered unacceptable by Google. As stated, the disavowing process is a time consuming one. Therefore, you can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you can use tools to quickly outline the links that caused the penalty.

20. You Need to Remove Links to Escape Penguin.

A lot of controversy hovers over this issue. Yet, instead of arising even more controversy, making all sort of assumptions and beating around the bush without any tangible results, let’s go straight to the source and see what Google has to say on this matter.

It′s always a good idea  to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Matt Cutts reiterated this whenever he got the opportunity. In an interview  from October 2012, he takes it a step further and states that, in order to benefit from this tool, link removal is mandatory and you cannot recover from a penalty with just a disavow file, because the system simply doesn′t let you:
″Google can look at the snapshot of links we saw when we took manual action. If we don’t see any links actually taken down off the web, then we can see that sites have been disavowing without trying to get the links taken down″, said Matt Cutts.

Yet, on a hangout from February 2015  John Mueller  from Google was asked whether it was better to remove or disavow when doing a Penguin cleanup. He answered that “Penguin is an algorithm, so it’s not really going to try to read your emails and figure out if you’re doing the right thing in trying to get that cleaned up. So, with regards to algorithms that look at these links, obviously not having those links on the website is a great thing because then we don’t have them to take a look at. If they’re in the disavow file and we’ve recrawled them like that, then obviously they also won’t be used for that algorithm. But, past that, it’s not going to try to make any judgment calls as to whether or not you tried to clean it up or not.”

Therefore, from this point of view, link removal looks more like a recommendation and not a must to.

This thing was reconfirmed in a hangout from October 2013 . When Penguin Algorithm was brought into discussion, the same John Muller says that “with regards to deleting them (links) or disavowing them, generally speaking if you have the ability to delete those links or add a nofollow I’d personally recommend that, because then you’d essentially be helping to clean up this issue overall. But, if you don’t have the ability to have those links removed or you can’t contact the webmaster…the site has been stale for years now…those kind of issues…using a disavow file is fine.”

21. If I Disavow Links to My Site Google Will Automatically Label Me as a Webspammer

This statement is as false as it can be. The purpose of this tool is to help you solve a problem that is unnatural link related. This, indeed, should be used with caution and only if you are sure of what you are doing. Yet, using it will not put you on Google’s spammers list. It just allows you to tell Google to nofollow a list of links, that you can not control.

22. You Should Always Disavow at Domain Level

A lot of fuss has been made on this theme and weather disavowing at a domain level is the right way to do things or not hasn’t been cleared out. Yet, in a previous post, we had some great experts sharing with us their experience in disavowing and one of the topic they tackled was the disavowing process at a domain level.

Mark Porter , SEO Manager at ScreamingFrog.co.uk, in an interview that he gave for an article on our blog,  came with an interesting point of view on this. He says that while this may be true 95% of the time, there are some exceptions where it doesn’t make sense to disavow a link at domain level. For example, perhaps you have a client who used to send out press releases with multiple anchor text links in them, which got picked up or syndicated on a decent high value site. It’s usually best to disavow these at URL level in case they receive natural pickup from these sites further down the line.

On the other hand, Krystian Szastok , Digital Marketing Manager @RocketMill, on the same interview,  states that the disavow should always be done at a domain level as most websites – especially the spammy ones – will give you many links from the same domain. Directories are a good example, you get a link from your listing and from any type of a category page.

Therefore, there is still room for much discussion regarding the disavow at a domain level. What is sure is that disavowing at a level domain is not an unshakable rule and one should always adapt the disavowing process to each situation in particular.

23. You Have to Make an Effort to Remove Links

What is not a myth is the fact that you can successfully use the Disavow Tool, not remove links, and experience a restoration of what’s been lost, as David Cohen states in an interview regarding experts’ opinion on the disavowing process. The removing links process might be one of the most common, and at the same time, harmful myth of all. Removing some or all links in order to restore the organic search visibility and traffic that’s been lost is a bit a paradoxical situation. Using the Disavow Tool and blindly removing links on a wholesale scale isn’t a smart or a strategic approach to solving the problem, it’s sloppy.

Yet, then again, like in any other situation, it depends on whether the site has a manual action or algorithmic one. Yet, the most shared expert opinion on this is that using just the disavow tool is sufficient and that no efforts need to be made repeatedly trying to get links removed from sites.

24. The Disavow Tool Does Not Work

We cannot say with certainty whether this statement is more of a myth or a fear of the webmasters. What is sure is that forums and blogs are full with discussions around this topic, with lots of people saying that they’ve used the disavow tool and their rankings did not improve, therefore it doesn’t work! Yet, so many factors may need to be taken into consideration.

Well known Marie Haynes from hiswebmarketing.com brings some light on this matter, listing some factors that can be at play and can be found “guilty” for the changeless ranks. For example, perhaps the site had very few good links and was only ranking well previously because of the power of links that are now being considered unnatural. Or maybe it was disavowed the wrong links. Or perhaps the site is also dealing with other issues such as suppression by the Panda algorithm.
I have seen many sites who have escaped Penguin, or have had a manual link penalty removed, which would not have been able to succeed without using the disavow tool. As Mary stated, the Disavow Tool is a vitally important one that needs to be used by any site that is suffering because of the presence of unnatural links.

 25.  I Can Not Reavow Links That I Already Disavowed.

There is this myth that once you disavow links there is no going back. Yet, if you have added a link to your disavow file in error, or if you change your mind about disavowing a particular link, you can remove the link from your file and reupload it. Theoretically, the next time that Google visits that particular link, it will see that it is no longer in your disavow file and will start counting that link toward your PageRank again. However, as Russell Jarvis  mentioned in an interview on our blog, reavow requests take much longer to be recognized as Google takes even stricter precautionary measures in this process to aid combating spammers who are trying to find loopholes. They usually crawl a domain a couple of times before revoking the disavow request.

26. I Don’t Need to Include Nofollow Links in the Disavow File.

A simple search with the query “disavow nofollow links” generates thousand of results that we could use to write a whole PhD thesis on this matter.

The truth is, that there is not a 100% correct answer to the question of whether one should disavow nofollow links or not. We wrote more about this on a previous post that you might find really useful in this context.

There are 2 major- contradictor opinions on this:

• No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [Google approved]
• Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

The safe bet, would be to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links.  Yet, you might consider disavowing no-follow links for a range of reasons:

1. No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases
2.Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things as shown in so many other myths above
3.“Link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition should be taken into consideration.

 27. It Takes Google Up to 3 Months to Process a Disavow file!

Google does not give a fixed or a maximum limit on how much someone should wait for one of the three replies (on manual penalties only):

• Yes, we think you are in good shape
• No, you still have some work to do
• We have processed your consideration request – meaning that they might have found multiple issues, maybe one issue is solved but there are other issues that still need to be checked.

It may take a couple of weeks, a month or more.

As Google representatives say, “this is something where depending on the URL sometimes we crawl them daily, sometimes we crawl them every couple of months. So if you submit a large disavow file or a disavow file that includes a lot of domain entries or just generally includes a lot of different URLs, then that is something that’s going to take quite a bit of time to kind of recrawl all of those URLs naturally and reprocess all of that information.”

Very fast recoveries are usually myths and in those cases something else might have caused the problem. Also, you must know that there is no way through which you can influence the Google Penalty Recovery process externally. Yet, if you feel that it takes too long, you can always ask for more information on the webmaster forum, just to be sure that you’re on the right track.

28. Google  Always Provides Correct Examples of Unnatural Links from Your Sites Link Profile.

It’s important to know that any automatic classification done by any  algorithms, as advanced as they might be, has a false positive ratio. And even if Google might have a low false positive ratio, errors can still occur. This is why a manual auditing of your site is highly important. We live in an era of fast solving problems through automated processes. Yet,it  is hard to believe that it’s possible for a tool to be 100% accurate. However, Google does require a lot of accuracy when it comes to submitting the disavow file. And this is where the human intervention appears and where manual audits should be done. And even if these ones are not perfect either, they might take you closer to a correct link classification.  Therefore, do not rely completely on automatic processes, even if it’s Google running that process as errors in the system can occur any time.

29. The Disavow Tool Does not Work on Negative SEO!

Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes and ways. Black hatters had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks towards small or large sites. Negative SEO can get companies penalized or entirely banned from Google. It can affect share price. It can even put companies out of business.
Yet, even in this case, the Disavow tool is highly useful. And we are not the only one saying that but our clients who were victims of negative SEO attacks. The big digital marketing agency, Jellyfish, experienced an aggresive form of a negative SEO attack and have a great recovery story all exposed on a previous post. Nevertheless, their recovery story implies the use of the Disavow Tool. As Jonathan Verrall, Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish mentions, contacting individual webmasters, as you can probably imagine, is very time consuming when there are thousands of links, hence the usefulness of the Disavow tool.
Therefore, the Disavow Tool works even on the undesirable case of a negative SEO attack.

Conclusion

Like any other list of this kind, we cannot say that this is exhaustive. Therefore, the list is open so feel free to add some more to our “exposition of myths”.
It’s true that it’s difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth, especially when you have knowledge of some cases when the situation might strengthen the myth rather than busting it. Yet, what is important is to analyze each situation in particular and react according to each. Also, a lot of things can be learned and applied from all the myths listed above. We recommend you to read them carefully, to come back to them any time when in doubt and dig deeper into each situation that occurs and not just take things as they are “urbanely” spread.