Let's Discuss The Disavow Tool

In late 2012 Google launched the disavow tool so that webmasters could report spammy links pointing at their site and discount them. It's been nearly 2 years since this tool has been available and it seems like the information on it is quite scarce. When the tool was first released many were opposed to using it ever, I'm sure some people still are. It seems like a few SEOs have changed their mind and now advocate using the tool under some circumstances.

What I'm wondering is, have any of you used the Disavow tool and what were the results? Have you used it on sites with mixed white/black hat link profiles? I'm hoping we can get a poll with everyone's experience on this tool.

My thoughts? That a company worth over a billion creates a cheap ass solution for a penalty and even
if you disavow your links they still might not lift the penalty. Oh yeah it's also Matts way of answering
the plight of negative SEO, however there again the penalty is still there.

I think its pathetic for the company Google claims to be.

I'm definitely against it's use, as we're basically doing googles job for them by identifying BH links.

However since so many people have used it and the chances of me adding anything new to the pool of BH links it's already identified is slim, I recently used it in a last ditch effort to recover a site that was penalised in feb 2013. I'm currently on RR number 3 with no improvements.

By using it I felt dirty and abused, it was how I imagine I'd feel after being ass-raped.

Complete garbage.

It is Google's placebo answer to appease all the webmasters who complain about negative SEO.

Add to that it allows them to gather a database of URLs to penalize, it really is a genius move on their part that kills two birds with one stone.

However from a webmaster standpoint it is worthless.

I think I have had it work for one site, and clearly not work at all for a few others. Before my penalty was lifted I did so many things to fix it, that I can't say disavow worked or not for sure. I have tried disavowing the same site 8 times in 8 months with no effect. The only time I felt required to use it was after buying links on a blog network, then suddenly that network started creating gambling and porn links on the same sites as my links! I couldn't contact the seller either. I will never need disavow again for any new sites is all I can say.

About 3 months ago my site got a manual review (f*ck me right ?) , I hired a service to cleanse my site from unnatural links and provided me with a letter for google and a link disavow tool, google replies 8 WEEKS later and says the unnatural links are still there and gave me an example.

Soooo now I'm trying again, thankfully the service is helping me out again (FREE) and hopefully in 8 weeks I will have my site back to it's former glory.