In the month of May we finalized an analysis of incoming links (disavow) for a client. We worked with a very large file that, later, we had to upload to Google Search Console : thus, Google could read which external links to our client’s website it should not take into account. Our file was a .txt that had more than 1 million lines (it seems that the bad guys tried ) and, when uploading it to Search Console , it gave us a loading error.

Consult Jhon Muller

We consulted our dilemma with John Muller (our question was: “Hey @JohnMu I have a disavow file to upload to Google and will not let me send it. (75MB) How do I do it?”) And this is what he answered us

This answer took us by surprise: we had been working in this way for years and it seemed to give good results. Finally, we found that disavows had a limit of 100,000 URLs and 2MB in weight, which in our case would not be enough. But considering the response of John Muller about the issue, we wonder are they really useful these strategies disavow of backlinks to improve the SEO of a website?

Our response to this problem was to leave the website without valid disavows in order to see the influence that this had on web positioning and on metrics such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow that are directly influenced by the backlinks of a domain. This is our result so far:

Conclution

We have come to the conclusion that Google does not give the importance that we believed to the toxicity of the backlinks that link to a website when it comes to positioning it. We will follow this topic very closely. From an SEO point of view , link building is one of the pillars when thinking about positioning a page within the first search results. Think about the hours we have invested in disavowing so that Google only now realizes that we are not the bad guys.

Likewise, it would not leave the malicious links that link to a website to chance, because the day may come when Google cannot differentiate if they are links made by us or by someone who is dedicated to negative SEO.