Google’s John Mueller told a Reddit user that the disavow tool “does have effects,” rejecting the idea that it functions as a placebo with no real influence on rankings. The exchange matters because it draws a hard line around a tool many practitioners had written off as inert, and because it answers a specific complaint rather than restating general guidance.
The thread involved a site that had bought guest posts and links through Fiverr, then dropped in rankings after submitting a disavow file. Mueller wrote that “there’s a lot of hate on the disavow tool here, but it has its place and time, it does have effects,” while cautioning that “disavowing a handful of links is not going to make your site drop out of search.” His recommended fix was to rebuild the disavow file to match what the site actually needs, whether that means an empty file or a targeted one, and then check for other causes: a broader spam update landing around the same time, or a technical fault like an accidental sitewide block.
The statement is easy to misread against separate remarks the same publication reported a day earlier, in which Mueller said old outbound links a site placed to domains that later turned spammy carry no penalty. Those two comments describe opposite directions of linking. The outbound case covers links a site chose to place years ago, pointing away from it, where Google’s position is that stale destination quality does not retroactively punish the linking page. The disavow case covers inbound links pointing at a site, which the site is actively asking Google to discount because it does not want credit or blame tied to them. Nothing in either statement contradicts the other; they answer different questions about which side of a link Google evaluates and when.
Search Engine Roundtable, which first reported the exchange, noted that Mueller has previously said most sites do not need to disavow anything, calling the practice a waste of time for the majority of site owners who reach for it defensively. Google has also said in the past that the disavow tool hurts more sites than it helps when used without cause, and the company has floated removing the tool entirely, following Bing’s earlier decision to drop its own version.
The practical read for SEO teams is narrower than either headline suggests. A disavow file only earns its keep when a site has a documented history of purchased or manipulative links and a plausible link to a ranking drop; absent that, submitting one adds risk without a clear upside. Teams debugging a recent ranking loss should first rule out timing overlap with a spam update or a technical misconfiguration before touching the disavow tool, since Mueller’s own advice treats those as the more likely explanations. Anyone maintaining an existing disavow file should audit it now rather than assume it is harmless background noise, given Mueller’s confirmation that the tool actively changes how Google weighs a site’s link profile.
Barry Schwartz reported the exchange for Search Engine Roundtable.