disavow is a honeypot? ... what exactly is your thought process behind that? Your telling me somewhere at Google there's someone going "Yep all we do is wait for some those assholes to disavow links then we got'em *evil laughter*"
sounds like some bat shit crazy conspiracy theory
It's a conspiracy theory, but not a crazy one. Google says the disavow tool tells Google to ignore a particular link to your site. The theories are:
- Google also uses disavow as a signal to devalue the authority/trust of other links from those same URLs / domains
- Google took the data from the disavow tool and used machine-learning to identify spam signals
Neither idea is crazy. From Google's standpoint, the disavow data is a hand-picked selection of websites that webmasters believe are spam. Were I them, I'd use it, too. I have no doubt that Google has tested versions of both of the above theories. The question is if they use either. I haven't seen any data proving/disproving it one way or the other.
On the whole, if you take Google at their word, then the disavow tool is rarely ever needed. The tool itself says:
We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.
I've emphasized the key language. It's kind of funny how strongly they discourage use of the tool, yet have it available nonetheless.
