If you have ever wondered about whether or not disavowed links would continue to show up in Google Search Console’s Link Report, the answer is yes.
While most who deal with links all the time are aware of it, those who might only be doing link removals on a smaller scale on a single site might not be aware of it. Because it is a selection of all links Google knows about, it displays all links, including both disavowed links and nofollowed ones.
This actually makes a lot of sense. It would be problematic if Google started removing links from the list if they were disavowed or nofollowed, especially as this list won’t contain all the links on a site. Remember, with Google only showing a selection of the links it knows about, and is by no means an all inclusive list, you would need to use third party link analysis tools to get a full representation of all the links.
SEOs: will disavowed domains still show under "your most linked content" in Search Console? (these were disavowed 18+ mths ago) cc @JohnMu
— Dan Shure (@dan_shure) December 1, 2015
@Marie_Haynes @dan_shure Yes.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) December 1, 2015
Jennifer Slegg
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Ryan Jones says
that’s been my understanding since they launched it. Disavow doesn’t make the link go away, it’s basically when the crawler finds a link to a site, it hits the disavow list, and if it’s on there, it pretends it has a nofollow and moves on.
Jennifer Slegg says
Yes, it has always been that way. And even if Google removed links from it based on a disavow, it is still only a partial list of links. But since some people didn’t realize it, I figured it was worth talking about, especially on a slow news day 🙂