Yesterday, Google’s John Mueller answered a question around Google’s Gary Illyes saying you don’t need to disavow for algorithms. John basically confirmed what Gary said, that you only need to use it if you have a manual action but added some additional clarity.

(1) He said you can 100% use it if you have a manual action and are unable to get the links in question to be removed or nofollowed. The manual action team will look at the disavow file and take it into consideration. Just a note from 2013, Google does want to see effort in manually removing links, not just using the disavow.

(2) You can use the disavow file to preemptively making sure you don’t get a manual action in the future. It might not work 100% but John said you can use that.

(3) If you do not trust Google’s algorithms are smart enough to automatically not count the bad links, then you can use the disavow. But logically, that doesn’t make sense to me. If Google thinks the links are good, why block them? I mean, Google will automatically block the bad links anyway, if they think those links are good, why block them? Whatever.

Here is what John said to Glenn’s question:

Question:

Answer:

This starts 2:50 into the video, here is the embed:

Forum discussion at Twitter.