The disavow file is a loaded gun, and most people shoot their own rankings.

What Google already does for free

The premise most disavow work rests on is that spammy links hurt you, so you must remove them. That premise is a decade out of date. Google has said, repeatedly, that it ignores the vast majority of low quality links rather than penalising the site they point at, because the alternative, letting anyone harm a competitor by pointing junk at them, would make the whole system trivial to abuse. The random directory links, the scraped copies, the forum spam: for almost everyone, these are already being discounted to zero without you touching anything.

So the routine quarterly disavow, run off a third party tool's "toxic" score, is mostly effort spent neutralising links that were already neutral. At best it does nothing. At worst it does the thing nobody intends, which is the reason to be careful with it.

How it backfires

A disavow file is a blunt instrument and the tools that generate it are worse. "Toxicity" scores are a vendor's model, not Google's judgement, and they routinely flag perfectly good links: a genuine editorial mention on a site with a low third party metric, a relevant niche blog, a legitimate directory. Feed a tool's list straight into the disavow tool and you can hand Google instructions to ignore links that were actively helping you. This is the same confusion of a vendor metric with a Google signal that gets sites into trouble elsewhere, pointed this time at your own backlinks.

It is also close to irreversible in practice. You can remove a domain from the file, but the recovery is slow and uncertain, and you have spent trust you did not need to spend. Aiming a permanent instruction at your own asset on the strength of an automated score is how careful people end up demoting the very earned links that took years to accumulate.

When it is genuinely the right call

There is a real use for it, which is exactly why it exists. If you have a manual action for unnatural links, disavowing the bad ones is part of the documented route back, alongside removing what you can and filing a reconsideration request. And if you, or an agency you inherited, actually bought links from networks, a disavow is part of cleaning up a self-inflicted problem rather than an imagined one. That work is deliberate, evidenced and done as part of a recovery, not run on a schedule against a score.

The distinction is the whole point. A disavow driven by a specific manual action or a known history of bought links is a scalpel used correctly. A disavow driven by a monthly tool export and a vague fear is the loaded gun of the title, pointed at your own foot.

The general lesson

A powerful tool with a narrow correct use gets dangerous the moment it becomes routine, because the routine strips away the judgement that made it safe. Reserve the disavow file for the cases that genuinely call for it, distrust any score that tells you to use it on a timetable, and remember that for most sites the honest answer to "which links should I disavow" is none of them.