Google, spammy links and disavow tool - Webmaster Central hangout

Came across another Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout issue which also featured common, but interesting question:

My website gets hundreds of links that seem to be spammy I suspect maybe one of my competitors is trying to decrease my rankings Do I need to keep disavowing these links week after week or should I only be worried if I get unnatural links manual action?

John Mueller's answer: So in general we do automatically take these into account and we try to kind of ignore them automatically when we see them happening and for the most part I suspect that works fairly well. I see very few people with actual issues around that so I think that's mostly working well with regards to disavowing these links. I suspect if these are just normal spammy links that are just popping up for your website then I wouldn't worry about them too much. Probably we figured that out on our own. If you're worried about them regardless if there's if it's something that you're not sure about, you're losing sleep over these links and you just want to make sure that Google handles them properly then using the disavow tool is perfectly fine. The disavow tool is not an admission of guilt or anything like that. You're essentially just telling our systems these links should not be taken into account for my website and there are multiple reasons why you might want links not to be taken into account. That's not something that our algorithms would try to judge for your website so if you're seeing spammy links from certain sites, using the domain directive makes it easy to handle these into disavow file and you can just submit those there. On the other hand, if you're if you feel that these links are pretty normal spammy and something that any algorithm would figure out than you can just leave them alone and just kind of move on. I think for most websites out there pretty much the really largest majority of websites you don't need to use a disavow tool. And that's also why we have to disavow tool so separate from search console so that you don't get tempted to using disavow tool because it looks like that's normal part of search console that everyone should be using. But it's really something that you only really need to use in in really extreme cases.

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