domain: vs individual URL in your disavow file

domain: vs individual URL in your disavow file

The myth: disavowing specific URLs is the "surgical" choice that protects you from over-disavowing.

Reality: URL-level disavow is a trap. Spammers generate infinite URLs on the same host; you'll list 50 paths and miss the 51st they spin up tomorrow.

— domain:badsite.com covers the whole host and every future page.
— Individual URLs cover exactly one page and rot the moment the spammer re-rolls.

Google's documentation itself recommends domain-level entries for most situations.

Actually, the only time URL-level makes sense is a single bad link on an otherwise valuable domain — say, one paid comment on a real publication you'd never want to nuke entirely.

Reality check: domain: by default, URL only as the rare exception.