In a recent video Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said that you can use the disavow tool even if you do not see that Google team members have given you a “manual action” in your Google Webmaster Tools.

When to Use the Google Disavow Tool

  1. You, in the past, conducted bad SEO or hired a bad SEO who built bad links to your site and you can’t get those links removed.
  2. Your rankings dropped and you think the Google Penguin algorithm caused this drop.
  3. You noticed a link bomb attack and are afraid it might hurt your site.
  4. There are links to your site that you do not want to be associated with.
  5. Your site seems to have been hit by negative SEO.

How to Use the Google Disavow Tool

  1. Check the quality of your backlink profile to find whether you have links that you don’t want to be associated with. We recommend the WebCEO Toxic Links report that detects all bad backlinks you have.
  2. Carefully investigate each toxic link (you don’t want to remove a good backlink by mistake) and check links you really want to remove.
  3. Try to contact the webmasters linking to you and ask to remove the links.
  4. Export the list of the toxic links that you couldn’t contact the webmasters about and report them to Google via the WebCEO Toxic Links report.