Back in the days Google's Disavow Tool could be useful to disavow spammy backlinks, which competitors created to hurt the rankings of a website.
Negative SEO and Spamlink-attacks were (and are) real and can cause serious damages to businesses relying on Google's Organic Search as a Traffic Source.
Of course, also Spammers and Blackhat-SEO's made heavy use of this tool to simply "recover" their sites from penalties, they have caused themselves, when buying toxic backlinks.
My theory is, that the Disavow-Tool was/is used by Blackhats way more frequently than by Whitehat SEOs. And Google therefore might have slightly changed the function of it.
For example, many Backlinksellers advertise like this to calm their potential clients: "In case of consequences, there's Google's Disavow tool, so no worries".
I directly confronted John Muller (Search Advocate at Google) with this - you can see his response in the attached image. He obviously dodged my question, but sometimes no answer can be an answer too, right?
There's an very interesting case study on Reddit on this and i have a lot more info, which i will try to put into an article on DaniWeb this weekend.
I have found a lot of answers for many questions, but on still remains...
Does the Disavow Tool still help to recover a website's lost rankings caused by spammy links?
Or does it nowadays hurt the rankings of a site even more, because Google lets it as kind of a "honeypot" for Blackhatters, which try to recover from the penalties they caused themselves?
If anybody has something to share about this, would be very appreciated.
Thanks for your attention,
Chris