Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that the order of URLs or domains in your disavow file doesn’t matter. Whether you list them at the top, bottom, or in any sequence, it has no impact on how Google processes the file.

He also mentioned that disavow files are not processed in real-time. Instead, Google picks them up when crawling and then applies the changes gradually as it continues to crawl the web.

John shared this information on Bluesky.

“”The order in the disavow file doesn’t matter. We don’t process the file per-se (it’s not an immediate filter of “the index”), we take it into account when we recrawl other sites naturally.””

So, if there’s a site you don’t trust and you add it to your disavow file, it doesn’t matter if you list it first or last—the order has no impact.

As a reminder, John Mueller has often said that disavowing links is usually a waste of time. Like Bing, Google might even remove the disavow tool in the future. In fact, Google has said the tool does more harm than good for most sites, and they’ve repeatedly advised against using it unless absolutely necessary.

That said, if you still choose to use it, just know that the order of links in the file doesn’t matter.

There’s an ongoing discussion about this on Bluesky.