Anchor text, "toxic" links and when the disavow tool is warranted

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Search engines use it to understand what the linked page is about, which is exactly why it has been abused: for years, buying links with the exact keyword you wanted to rank for ("best running shoes") was the core of manipulative link building. Google's systems have long been designed to detect and neutralise that, and its spam policies list keyword-rich, manipulative links among link schemes.

The disavow tool exists for sites caught on the wrong side of that history. It lets you tell Google to ignore specific links or domains when assessing your site. It is a narrow tool for a narrow problem, and much of the advice around it ("disavow toxic links monthly") goes well beyond what Google recommends.

What natural anchor text looks like

When people link to a site because they want to, they mostly use whatever words come naturally. For a hypothetical running shoe shop called Stride & Co, natural anchors look like:

Type	Examples	Typical share in natural profiles
Brand	"Stride & Co", "Stride and Co's shop"	Large
URL	"stridecompany.com", "https://stridecompany.com/"	Substantial
Generic	"here", "this guide", "their website"	Substantial
Descriptive / topical	"a guide to gait analysis", "this running shoe fitting service"	Moderate
Exact commercial keyword	"best running shoes", "buy running shoes online"	Small
Image links	Image alt text or empty	Variable

There are no official percentages and you should not aim for target ratios; building anchors to match a ratio is itself manipulation. But a profile where exact commercial keywords dominate across many unrelated sites does not happen naturally, and it is the clearest sign of past link buying.

Is a link actually a problem?

SEO tools label links "toxic" using their own scores. Those labels are not Google's, and most flagged links are ordinary web junk: scrapers, auto-generated directories, "site worth" pages, spam comments. Google has repeatedly said it ignores such links and that site owners do not need to act on them.

A link is worth worrying about when it combines several of these:

• It was placed by you or someone acting for you: paid, exchanged, part of a guest-post-for-links campaign or a network.
• It uses exact-match commercial anchor text.
• It sits on a site that exists mainly to sell links or links to many unrelated commercial sites.
• It is part of a pattern: dozens of similar links appearing in a short period.

The backlink audit guide describes how to find those patterns among the noise.

When to use the disavow tool

Google's guidance supports using the tool in two situations:

1. You have a manual action for unnatural links to your site in Search Console. Disavowing the links you cannot get removed is part of the clean-up before a reconsideration request; see manual actions.
2. You know there is a significant number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links that you or someone acting for you created, and you are concerned they could lead to a manual action.

Note what is not on the list: a ranking drop after a core update, a competitor ranking above you, or a tool reporting a high "toxic score". None of these, on their own, call for a disavow. Outside the two situations above, the recommended action is to do nothing. Disavowing random spam does not improve rankings, and disavowing links that were genuine removes their value.

Removal first

Where links were bought or placed, try to have them removed or changed to rel="sponsored" or nofollow before disavowing. Contact the site owner with a short, polite request listing the page and the link. Keep a record: site, contact, date, response. For a manual action, this record forms part of your reconsideration request and shows good faith. Expect many requests to go unanswered; that is what the disavow file is for.

The disavow file

The file is plain text, one entry per line, uploaded through Search Console's disavow links tool for the relevant property.

# Links bought by previous agency, 2023-2024. Removal requested
# 2026-10-12; no response from the following.
domain:cheap-links-network.example
domain:guestpostfarm.example
domain:article-directory.example

# Single page on an otherwise legitimate site
https://news.example.org/sponsored/best-running-shoes-2024

• Use domain: entries for spammy sites, so every page on them is covered.
• Use full URLs only when the rest of the site is legitimate and only one page is the problem.
• Lines starting with # are comments, useful for your own records; Google ignores them.
• Uploading a new file replaces the previous one entirely. Always edit the existing file and re-upload the full list, or earlier entries are lost.
• Keep a copy under version control or in your documentation.

Mistakes that make things worse

• Disavowing everything a tool flags. This regularly removes legitimate links from small but real sites.
• Disavowing your own domains or partner sites by accident when using broad lists.
• Uploading a new file without the old entries, undoing previous clean-up.
• Expecting a ranking jump. If the links were already ignored, disavowing them changes nothing. If they were helping (even manipulatively), removing them may lower rankings to where the site stands without them.
• Using disavow instead of stopping the cause. If someone is still buying links for the site, the file will never be finished.

If someone points spam at you

Every so often a site owner notices thousands of new links from obviously spammy domains, sometimes with adult or gambling anchors, appearing within a few days. It looks like an attack, and sometimes it is one. Google's long-standing position is that its systems are built to ignore this kind of link, and that negative SEO attacks of this type very rarely work.

Sensible steps: note the dates and the domains, check the Manual actions report (it will almost certainly be clear), and keep monitoring rankings and impressions. If nothing changes, there is nothing to do. If you are genuinely worried, or if a manual action does appear, a domain-level disavow of the obvious spam costs little; but do not let the episode turn into a monthly ritual of disavowing whatever a tool reports.

Inheriting a link profile

Agencies and new in-house teams often inherit sites whose link history nobody fully knows. Before deciding on any disavow, ask the client directly whether links were ever bought, exchanged or built through networks, and by whom. Look for an existing disavow file in Search Console and download it before changing anything; uploading a new one replaces it. Check whether past manual actions were recorded in the property's messages. Then audit as described above. Starting from facts avoids both extremes: ignoring a real problem, or disavowing years of legitimate links out of caution.

Internal anchor text is different

Everything above concerns links from other sites. Internal links on your own site are not treated as link schemes, and descriptive, keyword-relevant internal anchors are good practice. The internal risk is different: using the same anchor for different pages, or so much repetition that pages read unnaturally. The internal linking guide covers internal anchors.

After the clean-up

Rankings after a link clean-up settle at the level the site earns on its own merits. For sites that relied heavily on bought links, that may be lower than before, at least for a while. The way back up is the slow, durable kind of link building described in the ethical link building guide, plus content that earns citations on its own. Recording the clean-up date in your reporting helps explain any movement to clients or managers later.

Keep watching the link profile once or twice a year. If a new cluster of keyword-anchored links appears that nobody on your side created, document it with dates. It is most likely ignored, but a record helps if it ever needs explaining.