Toxic backlinks are links that an SEO tool flags as risky, usually spammy directories, scraper sites or pages with keyword-stuffed anchors. The label comes from vendors, not from Google. Google’s John Mueller has said Google has no internal notion of toxic backlinks, and Google’s own help page says most sites will never need to disavow anything. Spammy links only become a real problem when you bought or built them to manipulate rankings, or when they’ve triggered a manual action.
That’s the short answer. The longer one matters because I keep meeting site owners who paid someone to “clean up” hundreds of links a tool painted red, and nothing changed afterwards. Below I compare the tool view with Google’s view, then show you the three conditions that decide whether a bad link deserves your time.
Where Does the “Toxic” Label Come From?
It comes from backlink tools. Each vendor trains its own model on its own crawl, then gives every linking page or domain a risk number. Those numbers are useful for sorting. They aren’t a verdict from Google.
Here is how the two best known scores are defined, in the vendors’ own words.
Semrush Toxicity Score. Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool rates each link on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is good and 100 is very toxic, and sorts links into Toxic, Potentially Toxic and Non-Toxic. According to Semrush’s own knowledge base, the score draws on 45+ “toxic markers”, such as mirror pages, forum signature links and money keyword anchors.
Moz Spam Score. Moz describes Spam Score as the percentage of sites with similar features that it found to be penalized or banned by Google. Its model uses 27 features, and it bands the result as low (1–30%), medium (31–60%) and high (61–100%). Some of those features are things like a missing phone number, no Google Tag Manager, or numerals in the domain name.
Moz is honest about the limits. Its help page says the score is based on correlation with penalization “rather than causation”, and that the fix “isn’t necessarily” to disavow high-scoring links. Ahrefs goes further and doesn’t publish a toxic score at all. Its help center calls “toxic backlinks” a term invented by certain tools.
So when a report says you have 312 toxic links, read that as “312 links that match patterns our model dislikes”. That’s a starting list for a human to review. It isn’t a penalty count.
What Has Google Said About Toxic Backlinks?
Google has been blunt about this for years, and the message hasn’t softened.
- In May 2024, Mueller wrote on Reddit that “the concept of toxic links is made up by SEO tools so that you pay them regularly” (reported by Search Engine Roundtable).
- In December 2024, he called disavowing toxic links flagged by SEO toolsets a “billable waste of time” on Bluesky.
- At the Search Central event in New York in April 2025, he said “internally we don’t have a notion of toxic backlinks”, and that disavowing isn’t part of normal site maintenance (reported by Search Engine Journal).
- In March 2026, he added a nuance on Bluesky: “Most sites don’t need it, but that’s not all sites,” calling the disavow file “a tool, not a religion.”
The official documentation says the same thing in calmer language. Google’s disavow help page states that “most sites will not need to use this tool” because Google can usually work out which links to trust by itself.
The reason is SpamBrain, Google’s AI spam system. When Google announced the December 2022 link spam update, it said SpamBrain can detect both sites buying links and sites that exist to pass outgoing links, and that it would “neutralize the impact of unnatural links”. A neutralized link doesn’t drag you down. It simply stops counting, and SpamBrain is also the system behind each Google spam update I track, including the one that began on 24 September 2026.
Myth vs Fact: Five Things People Believe About Toxic Links
| Belief | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| “A high toxic score means Google is penalizing me.” | A toxic score is a vendor’s prediction. Google has said it has no internal toxic link concept. A penalty shows up as a manual action in Search Console, not in a third-party tool. |
| “Every spammy link pointing at me hurts my rankings.” | Google says it can assess which links to trust in most cases, and SpamBrain neutralizes unnatural links. Most random spam is ignored. |
| “I should disavow everything the tool flags.” | Google’s own manual action guidance warns against blindly disavowing all backlinks. Disavowing good links by mistake can cost you. |
| “Competitors can sink me with spam links.” | Gary Illyes said he reviewed hundreds of alleged negative SEO cases and none turned out to be negative SEO. |
| “Bad links never matter.” | Wrong in one specific case: links you bought or built to manipulate rankings can lead to an “Unnatural links to your site” manual action. |
The Three Conditions That Decide Whether a Bad Link Matters
When I look at a scary link report, I ignore the color coding at first. I ask three questions, in this order, and they settle almost every case.
- Who created the link? If you, a past owner or an SEO you hired bought it or built it, it’s your responsibility. If a scraper or a random spam network created it without your involvement, Google treats it very differently.
- Is there a manual action in Search Console? Open Security & Manual Actions, then Manual actions. A green check means no human reviewer has flagged your site. An “Unnatural links to your site” notice changes everything.
- Is there a pattern or just noise? Ten scraper links from sites that copy the whole web are noise. Four hundred exact-match anchors from a paid network form a pattern Google’s policies describe word for word.
If the answers are “not me”, “no manual action” and “noise”, I leave the links alone. Honestly, that’s the most common outcome. If any answer points the other way, the link is worth a proper review.
Tool Score vs Google’s View, Side by Side
| Criterion | Vendor toxic score | Google’s view | What decides it |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Similarity to patterns in the vendor’s training data | Whether a link was made to manipulate rankings | Intent and pattern, not a number |
| Where you see a problem | A red percentage in a paid dashboard | A manual action in Search Console | Search Console is the only official signal |
| Default action | Often “add to disavow list” | Do nothing unless there’s a manual action or a link scheme | Google’s rule wins |
| Accuracy on innocent links | Can flag normal blogs and forums | Relevance checks mean irrelevant links are ignored | Human review beats either |
The tools do one job well. They find links fast, and they surface patterns like a spike of identical anchors that you might miss in a raw export. I use them for that. Where they go wrong is the leap from “this looks spammy” to “this is hurting you”, and that leap is where a lot of paid cleanup work gets sold.
When Do Spammy Links Actually Hurt You?
There are real cases where links cause damage. They all involve manipulation, and usually manipulation by the site itself.
You bought links that pass ranking credit. Google’s spam policies list “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as link spam. Paid placements are allowed when they’re marked with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Unmarked, they’re exactly what the manual action targets.
You ran a link scheme. Excessive link exchanges, automated link programs, low-quality directory and bookmark links, and optimized anchors in forum signatures are all named in the same policy. If a past agency did this at scale, the risk is real even if you never saw the invoice.
You bought a site with a dirty history. Google’s manual actions help page covers this case directly. If you recently acquired a site that broke the rules before you owned it, you fix the issues and say so in your reconsideration request.
You already have a manual action. Google describes the “Unnatural links to your site” action as a pattern of “unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links”. This is the one situation where cleanup and a disavow file are clearly part of the fix. If you’re in it, my step-by-step guide on how to disavow backlinks walks through the file format and the reconsideration request, and my team handles these cases through SEO recovery.
Is Negative SEO a Real Threat?
Mostly, no. In a 2024 interview reported by Search Engine Journal, Illyes said he’d seen “hundreds, literally hundreds of examples of alleged negative SEO and all of them were not negative SEO.” His explanation was relevance. If a casino site links to a flower shop, Google has no reason to trust that link, so it doesn’t.
Google’s disavow page also says it “works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website.” In my experience, when a site drops right after a burst of spam links, the drop almost always has another cause. A core update, a technical change or a lost good link is far more likely.
There’s one situation where I’d act anyway. If spam keeps arriving at a volume that genuinely worries you, Mueller’s March 2026 comment says it’s “totally fine” to use a disavow file for peace of mind. A narrow, domain-level file does little harm. A panicked file with thousands of lines copied from a tool can do real harm.
My Verdict on Toxic Backlinks
For a site that has never bought links or hired a link scheme, “toxic backlinks” are not worth your time or money. However, if you or someone you paid built manipulative links, or Search Console shows an unnatural links manual action, then those links are a real problem and you should clean them up.
That’s the whole judgment. The label “toxic” is marketing. The underlying risk, paid and schemed links, is real, and it’s covered by Google’s link spam policy rather than by any vendor score.
When the Answer Flips
- If you find a manual action for unnatural links, switch from “ignore” to “remove first, then disavow what you can’t remove”.
- If you inherited a site or a past agency’s link campaign, review those links properly even without a manual action, because Google names this exact risk.
- If you still pay for dofollow links today, stop or get them marked
rel="sponsored". Cleaning up old links while buying new ones makes no sense.
What I Do When a Client Sends Me a Scary Toxic Report
First, I open Search Console, not the tool. If there’s no manual action, I check whether the client ever paid for links or used a link vendor. Most of the time the answer is no, and I tell them to close the report and spend that budget on earning one good link instead.
When a deeper review is justified, I run it as part of a full backlink audit, which covers the whole link profile, not just the red rows. I judge individual links with the checks in my guide on how to evaluate backlink quality. And I look at domains rather than raw link counts, because one spam site can generate thousands of URLs; my post on backlinks vs referring domains explains why that distinction matters.
The better long-term defense is a clean link profile you actually control. That’s why my foundation link building work sticks to brand profiles, real business listings and relevant niche directories, and never includes comment spam or bought placements. If you’d like a second opinion on a link report before you pay anyone to “detox” it, ask for a free SEO audit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Toxic Backlinks Get My Site Penalized?
Only in narrow cases. Google penalizes link manipulation, not links a tool dislikes. If you bought links or ran a link scheme, you can receive an “Unnatural links to your site” manual action. Random spam you didn’t create is usually ignored by SpamBrain.
Should I Remove Toxic Backlinks Flagged by Semrush?
Not automatically. Treat Semrush’s Toxicity Score as a list to review, not a to-do list. Check Search Console for a manual action and ask whether anyone on your side created those links. If both answers are no, leaving them alone is the safer choice.
How Do I Know If a Link Is Actually Harmful?
Ask whether it was paid for or placed to pass ranking credit, whether it’s part of a large pattern of exact-match anchors, and whether Search Console shows a manual action. A link from an irrelevant spam site that you never asked for is almost always harmless.
Did Google Get Rid of the Disavow Tool?
No. Google’s disavow tool is still available as of September 2026, though Google says most sites won’t need it. Bing removed its own disavow feature in October 2023, saying its systems can separate natural from unnatural links.
Last updated: September 2026 by Mizanur Rahman
