What exactly does "disavow" mean?

What is disavowing?

Disavowing means that you are asking Google to not consider (ie. give credit to) a link back to your site. You would want to do this if it is a low quality link, because a lot of low quality links can trigger a Google penalty, which, in its turn, leads to lower rankings and traffic.

The process of disavowing with Monitor Backlinks includes two steps:

Disavow the bad link in Monitor Backlinks
Submit the disavow file to Google.

Please read this article for more details.

Disavowing is not asking a site to remove a link

This is different than asking a site to remove a link.

Google advises that you should first ask a site owner to remove a link before disavowing. In practice, most requests are unsuccessful, which makes disavowing necessary anyway.

Disavowing is not deleting a link in Monitor Backlinks

Deleting a link in Monitor Backlinks just removes it from the Monitor Backlinks interface. It doesn't send any information to Google, and therefore doesn't have any effect on disavowing.

Updated on: 19/08/2019