They proved Google was already ignoring the "toxic" links — from their own server logs

They proved Google was already ignoring the "toxic" links — from their own server logs

The myth: if a bad link exists, Google is counting it against you.

Before disavowing anything, one technical SEO pulled 90 days of crawl logs and cross-referenced the 3,100 "toxic" domains a tool had flagged. Findings: 2,740 of those domains had never been crawled by Googlebot in that window, and 280 returned 404 or were deindexed entirely.

So at most ~80 live, crawled pages could plausibly pass any signal.

Actually, a link Google never fetches from a page Google never indexes transfers exactly nothing. The disavow file would have "protected" them from 2,740 ghosts.

Reality check: before you disavow, check whether the links even exist in Google's eyes. Usually most don't.