In 2013, Google told us that it is not enough to disavow links if you want your unnatural link manual action to be reversed. Is that still true in 2021? The answer is probably yes.

John Mueller of Google was asked this on Twitter the other day and John said disavowing is generally still not enough.

John said “We do recommend taking the time to review, clean up, and document any issues like those. The webspam team likes to see that you’re aware of the details & have taken action. If for whatever reason you can’t clean it up on the other site, the disavow tool can be useful too.”

This is similar messaging to messaging Google issues in 2013. So make sure to actively work on removing unnatural links, if you get the manual action.

Forum discussion at Twitter.