Disavow Links Tool was launched by Google last year to help webmasters to file disavow of bad/low quality links which they were unable to get removed manually. There are numerous case studies which shows that disavow links works positively, but still there was question in minds of webmasters, whether tool should be used only after receiving warning OR it can be used even without having any manual penalty.
Matt Cutts, in recent video answered one such question from one of the user, the question asked was like
“Should I use the disavow tool even though a manual action hasn’t been applied to my site? Should webmasters use it, even if it is believed to be no penalty applied”
Matt clarifies that main purpose of “Disavow Links Tool” is to remove bad/spammy/low quality links which you can’t get manually removed. Matt says to use tool without any worry if you feel there are some bad links which can be harmful and even you have not received any warning/penalty. So you can use Disavow in following conditions:
- You have applied all manual attempts to get removed bad links, but still some links live which can harm your website
- If you think someone doing Negative SEO for your website OR already applied, you can use to remove those negative/bad links
- You have been monitoring your back links and found that there are spammy links OR strange pattern of links in your profile
So its clear that you can use Disavow Tool even if you do not have manual action or warning, but first try to get as many as you can get removed manually and after that disavow the remaining links.
If you are still new to disavow request, here is how sample files looks like to Disavow bad links:
# example.com removed most links, but missed these
https://links1.example1.com/stuff/comments.html
https://links2.example2.com/stuff/bad-links.html
# Contacted owner of domain.com on 7/1/2013 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:domain.com