Disvowing Toxic Links or Not?

I got an alert from SEMRush today to say I am at risk of a penalty due to toxic backlinks. This happened before and I disvowed the links, It didn't seem to do me any good as I saw some rankings fall (maybe a coincidence). This time around I am wondering should I bother. The majority of links are to images and not actually HTML pages. Sure, its a toxic link to my domain but its just a .jpg. Surely Google is smart enough to know that 1) I would have not purchased this backlink and therefore are not engaging in black hat SEO to artificially boost an image and 2) that these domains are pure garbage and to just ignore them rather than punish those who they link to?. I feel like Google punishing people for these domains is how people could unleash a negative SEO attack on a website.

At the same time, 199 toxic domains is something to raise an eyebrow at. I would rather not mess with the disvow for the reason that Google should be more than smart enough to not punish me for these sites. I accept that If i paid for 100 backlinks and these are showing up as toxic, I should remove them but I have never seen these domains before and they are all garbage sites. Should I even bother with this issue?

I respect that google punish a website for outbound links. You fully control them. Do they care about inbound anymore? By care, I mean punish sites for bad links or do they just ignore them for fear of the damage a negative SEO war could cause if people just bought trash backlinks against competitors.

I’m interested to know as well. Have a few of those.

Do competitors still bother to direct crap links to other sites?

ThaiDreamer said:

I’m interested to know as well. Have a few of those.

Do competitors still bother to direct crap links to other sites?

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I would think Google would have to be on top of this. I feel it would be very difficult to detect artificial backlinks that a site owner bought for their own site and backlinks that a competitor purchased. They surely have to just ignore the spam links for fear of starting a huge negative SEO war

ThaiDreamer said:

I’m interested to know as well. Have a few of those.

Do competitors still bother to direct crap links to other sites?

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Very actual question! I think that depends on the niche and level of competition.

If you get a penalty from google, it can take along time to get a site back to where it was. Trust me, I learned the hard way with a money site.

Take the semrush advisory as a warning! Act now or pay the price eventually

Mister Digital said:

If you get a penalty from google, it can take along time to get a site back to where it was. Trust me, I learned the hard way with a money site.

Take the semrush advisory as a warning! Act now or pay the price eventually

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I definitely get the logic behind this but why don't I just buy 1000 cheap spam backlinks to my competitors and win? SEMRush reports many of these sites are deindexed so surely that's a sign that they are being ignored already?

danoseo said:

I definitely get the logic behind this but why don't I just buy 1000 cheap spam backlinks to my competitors and win? SEMRush reports many of these sites are deindexed so surely that's a sign that they are being ignored already?

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You asked for an opinion and I gave you advice based on my experience. Many of the site links will have been deindexed if they are of low quality.

It all depends on the integrity of your site and your long term goals for it. Personally I would recommend a clean back link profile. Good luck!

Just ignore them if there is no impact on your site rankings.

It depends on your rank i think. Sometimes it makes the website better sometimes i lost my rank on google.