How to Disavow Spammy Backlinks: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

When it comes to SEO, backlinks play a huge role in determining how your website ranks in search engine results. However, not all backlinks are beneficial. In fact, spammy backlinks—links from low-quality, spammy, or irrelevant sites—can seriously hurt your SEO.

If you’re facing issues with spammy backlinks that are dragging down your rankings (especially those with high Spam Scores), disavowing these links is a crucial step. This guide will walk you through how to identify and disavow harmful backlinks to improve your website’s SEO performance.

What Are Spammy Backlinks?

Spammy backlinks are links that come from low-quality, irrelevant, or even dangerous websites. These links may be the result of black-hat SEO tactics (unethical practices to manipulate rankings) or simply come from sites that Google considers spammy. Common characteristics of spammy backlinks include:

• Links from irrelevant websites (e.g., a link from a completely unrelated industry).
• Low domain authority or inactive websites.
• Toxic websites with a high Spam Score (usually greater than 30%).
• Links from subdomains or link farms (artificially built websites with lots of backlinks but little-to-no organic traffic).

While good backlinks help your site’s SEO by showing that your content is trusted and relevant, spammy backlinks can harm your site’s reputation with Google, leading to penalties and drops in rankings.

How to Identify Spammy Backlinks

Before you can disavow harmful backlinks, you need to identify them. Here’s how you can find spammy backlinks pointing to your site:

1. Use Backlink Checker Tools

Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz can help you identify all the backlinks that are pointing to your website. These tools also allow you to assess the quality of each backlink, so you can spot potential issues like:

• Low Domain Authority (DA): If the website linking to you has a very low DA, it could be a spammy source.
• High Spam Score: Google and other SEO tools rate websites based on their trustworthiness. A website with a high Spam Score (above 30%) can be flagged by Google as manipulative.
• Link Farms: These are sites that have a high number of backlinks but little-to-no traffic. This usually indicates that the site is engaging in manipulative linking practices.

2. Manually Review Backlinks

You can also manually review your backlinks to spot any that seem suspicious. Look for the following signs:

• Inactive sites or empty pages.
• Toxic backlinks from websites flagged as unsafe by tools like Google Safe Browsing.
• Websites with unnatural patterns of backlinks (e.g., too many links with little or no organic traffic).

How to Extract Domains from Spammy Backlinks

Once you’ve identified the spammy backlinks, the next step is to extract the domains to disavow them properly. Here’s how you can do it, step by step:

Step 1: Identify the Domain

You might have backlinks coming from various URLs, but instead of disavowing each individual link, it’s often more efficient to disavow the entire domain. This is especially useful if a spammy link comes from multiple subdomains of the same domain.

Let’s say you have the following backlink URLs:

• http://spammywebsite.com/page1
• http://spammywebsite.com/page2
• http://blog.spammywebsite.com/page3

Instead of disavowing each link individually, you can simply disavow the whole domain: spammywebsite.com.

Step 2: Extract the Domain Name Using Excel

To extract the domain name from each URL, you can use the following Excel formulas. This helps when you’re dealing with backlinks from subdomains or when URLs are messy. Here’s how to do it:

1. Formula for Extracting the Domain: In Excel, if your backlinks are listed in column A, use the following formula in column B to extract the domain: =SUBSTITUTE(REPLACE(REPLACE(A2, 1, IFERROR(FIND("//", A2)+1, 0), TEXT(,))&"/", FIND("/", REPLACE(A2, 1, IFERROR(FIND("//", A2)+1, 0), TEXT(,))&"/"), LEN(A2), TEXT(,)), "www.", TEXT(,)) This will extract the main domain from the URL. For example:
   • http://www.spammywebsite.com/page1 will give you spammywebsite.com
   • http://blog.spammywebsite.com/page1 will give you spammywebsite.com
2. Adding the “domain:” Prefix To ensure you’re disavowing the entire domain, use this formula in column C to add the domain: prefix: =CONCATENATE("domain:", B2) This will convert spammywebsite.com into domain:spammywebsite.com, which is the correct format for disavowing a domain.

Step 3: Create a .txt File

After extracting and formatting the domains, copy the list and paste it into a plain text document (e.g., .txt file). Make sure each entry is on a new line, like this:

domain:spammywebsite.com
domain:anotherspammydomain.com

How to Disavow Spammy Backlinks Using Google Search Console

Once you’ve created your disavow list, you can upload it to Google Search Console to tell Google to ignore those backlinks.

Step-by-Step Process:

1. Sign into Google Search Console
   Go to Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account.
2. Upload Your Disavow File
   • In Google Search Console, search for “Disavow Links” and open the Disavow Links Tool.
   • Click on “Choose File”, then upload your .txt file containing the domains you want to disavow.
3. Confirm Your Request
   After uploading, Google will start processing your request. It may take a few weeks for Google to process and ignore the disavowed backlinks.

Video Guide Step by Step: How to Disavow Spammy Backlinks