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⚠️ Note: It is generally not a good idea to disavow websites just because they "look spammy". Google's John Muller provides more insights into this, which you can refer to here.
You can get more information about how best to use the Google Disavow Tool here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-disavow-links/
Disavow links is a legacy feature that previously allowed people to hide certain backlinks in Site Explorer legacy reports. Please note that we have now removed this feature on all Site Explorer reports.
Instead, you can now use the Best links filter which allows you to filter out backlinks from your reports, based on a set of rules which you can configure. This is available on Overview, Backlinks, and Referring domains reports in Site Explorer.
How does the Best links filter work, and what does it affect?
The Best links feature does not affect calculation of metrics like DR or UR. However, it will affect the number of backlinks shown in metrics and historical charts.
You can customise this filter to hide links based a number of metrics such as: DR, Traffic, Keywords in top 100, and so on. Doing so will also filter out any new backlinks that match a specific criteria so you don't need to manually monitor and update a list of referring domains.
How many domains can I enter in to manually exclude in the Best links filter?
Up to 10,000 domains can be entered into the "Exclude domains" field.
What happened to my old disavowed links list?
If you previously used the legacy Disavow feature and have a list of disavowed URLs saved, it still can be found on your project dashboard, under Disavowed links.
⚠️ We will fully remove this feature on 12th August 2024. Please download and save your data from this feature before then. Once this feature is gone, the data cannot be retrieved.
This tool only helps to keep a copy of URLs or domains. If you wish to use it to disavow backlinks in Google Search Console, it still needs to be exported out and uploaded to Google Search Console separately.
To export this disavow file, click on the Export button on the top right, and tick the "Save as TXT for upload to Google Disavow Tool" option.
