Disavowed inks

[joebella]

If we disavow spammy links to our site in google, will the overall number of incoming links reported in webmaster tools reflect the drop? (assuming google indeed disavowed them).

[joebella]

Thanks again Marie. I'll just keep running the tools and applying the new "toxic" ones to our list by removing duplicates.

[MarieHaynes]

The tools will definitely not be able to tell that those links are disavowed.  Only Google can see the invisible nofollow that they have applied.  To other backlink checkers the links will still be there.

[joebella]

if they are disavowed in google (the spammy links), will link detox tools still continue picking them up every single time like WMT will?

Thanks Marie!

[MarieHaynes]

Nope.

Google essentially adds a nofollow tag to them, but it's not visible to anyone other than the algorithms.  Your links will still show in WMT and will still be counted towards your total.

It can take a few weeks or even longer for Google to crawl each of your links and disavow them but you get no notification or indication that this has been done.