Are Toxic Backlinks Ignored by Google - SEO Forum

Hey guys, I just wanted to point out that over the years, Google has undergone significant AI server updates when it comes to search rankings and backlink density.

Back in the days of the Panda update, going back to 2014/2016, we saw substantial shifts in rankings when it came to toxic backlinks.

Toxic backlinks were considered backlinks with low density in terms of Domain Authority (DA) or related to spammy topics such as adult content or gambling.

In the last few years, Google has undertaken many tasks to improve this feature. Website owners, web developers, and even bloggers have been targeted by spam websites, competitors, or random individuals attempting to de-rank their websites from search engine results pages (SERPs) and Google rankings.

New updates inside google now ignore such spam generating websites and ignore any rank interactions on websites which get targeted.

It's now true that the best practice is to simply ignore the disavow tool and any toxic backlinks, as Google disregards them and they no longer have significant ranking factors.

Google focuses more on website authority, social scores, and popularity, as well as factors such as bounce rates, audience interaction, website speed, core web vitals, and many others when determining rankings. In fact, using the Google Disavow tool has shown a significant drop in rankings and search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

My Toxic Backlinks Experiment:

Back in 2020, one of my blogs experienced a high density of toxic backlinks. In order to address this issue, I decided to take a significant gamble and conduct an experimental test. I used SEMrush's backlink tools to disavow all links coming from nudity, gambling, and spammy websites with high toxic spam scores.

In total, I disavowed approximately 150 backlinks that had a toxicity score of over 70 according to SEMrush's algorithm. These backlinks were deemed highly toxic and provided no value to our website.

To my surprise, enabling the disavowal of these 150 toxic backlinks had a negative impact on our my traffic. It significantly impacted our website's performance.

Google disavow had negative effects

I also run the experiment on another website where we disavowed toxic backlinks and also had the same results, check out the image below.

Google Disavow

As you can see above, disavowing the toxic backlinks and instructing Google to ignore them had a negative impact on my websites. However, removing the disavowed backlinks and simply leaving them alone has a positive impact.

2025 (update) Google now ignores toxic backlinks, so I would recommend people not to worry about these. 

My Conclusion and my Experiment Results

Based on my experiment results, it is evident that leaving the toxic backlinks untouched in the Google Search Console has beneficial effects.

In addition, I have noticed a significant increase in the number of .blogspot backlinks appearing in the SERP's database over the past few months. Despite having a Domain Authority (DA) of "0," I discovered that these backlinks do not impact my website's rankings in any way.

Therefore, it is advisable to disregard toxic backlinks and instead focus on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) scores and web core vitals.

Also in 2025 google updates, many websites with BAD EAT score rank higher with website who reach 100%, so it's all pretty based on content you make, and how well you optimize your content.

Saying that, I did post a forum post with 200 words, with page rank of 1, and it managed to overtake websites which have page rank of 20+. Ranking 7th and 6th. So this shows that many new websites can make a huge impact on traffic, if the topic, blog or niche is correct.

This must mean that google has changed its algorithm in 2025 SEO update? Let's hope it stays like that! Since every new update, google releases another updated with more advancements and improvements.

Saying that, similar update they run in 2015 run for almost 5 years, so this looks great for all new websites!

My recommendation

Simply don't worry about any toxic backlinks, as they will have no impact on your website. This is my conclusion, just create some good evergreen content, and pay attention to details you include in your topics, and style of your writing.