Export your referring domains from Ahrefs or Semrush, split them into keep, ignore, and act, and reserve the disavow tool for links you or a past vendor actually built. Most junk links pointing at a cannabis site are noise that Google already ignores.
Get the full export first
Pull the Referring domains report from Ahrefs Site Explorer or the Backlink Audit export from Semrush, then add whatever Google Search Console lists under Links, because no single tool sees everything. Merge the lists in a spreadsheet and dedupe by domain. For most dispensary and brand sites this lands somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand domains. The sorting goes faster than that number suggests.
Sort every domain into three buckets
Keep: real sites that chose to link to you, meaning press, directories, blogs, suppliers, partners. Ignore: scrapers, stat aggregators, expired-domain junk, random foreign forums. These look alarming and do nothing. Act: links someone built on your behalf that violate Google's link spam policy — bought placements passing PageRank, private blog network posts, mass guest posts stuffed with exact-match anchors, or leftovers from an old SEO vendor's package.
Know what toxic actually means
Ahrefs and Semrush both print toxicity-style scores, and both overcount. A tiny foreign blog linking to your homepage is not toxic, it is irrelevant. The links worth acting on show a pattern: dozens of low-quality domains using the same commercial anchor, pointing at the same money page, appearing within the same month. That pattern reads as a scheme whether or not you were the one who paid for it.
Leave the harmless junk alone
Google has said for years that it ignores most spam links, and the ignore bucket is where that promise applies. Disavowing eight hundred scraper domains achieves nothing, eats a day, and risks catching a real link in the sweep. Cannabis sites attract more scraper noise than most because strain content gets copied endlessly. Let it sit.
Use the disavow tool for the act bucket only
Two situations justify a disavow file: a manual action notice in Search Console, or a pile of links you know were bought or built to manipulate rankings. List the offenders at domain level, upload the file in Search Console, and move on. One exception worth trying first — if a placement you paid for is still live and the site is cooperative, ask them to switch the link to rel="sponsored" instead. That fixes the policy problem without discarding the referral traffic.
A worked example
Say a CBD brand inherits its site from an agency that ran a link package in 2022. The merged export shows 240 referring domains. Sorting finds 130 keepers, 30 real directories and press hits among them, plus 60 scraper domains and 50 off-topic guest posts all anchored on the phrase buy CBD gummies online. The 60 get ignored. The 50 go into a domain-level disavow file, uploaded the same afternoon. Rankings do not jump the next week, and that is normal. The point was removing the scheme footprint before a spam update or a reviewer found it.
Key takeaways
- Merge exports from Ahrefs or Semrush with Search Console before sorting anything.
- Three buckets: keep, ignore, act. The ignore bucket is usually the biggest and needs no work.
- Toxicity scores overcount; the real signal is a repeated commercial-anchor pattern.
- Disavow only what was built to manipulate rankings or flagged in a manual action.
Frequently asked questions
Should I disavow every spammy link I find?
No. Google ignores most low-quality links on its own, and a broad disavow can cut links that were quietly helping you. Disavow links you or a vendor built in violation of the link spam policy, plus anything flagged in a manual action, and leave the rest alone.
How often should I re-run a backlink audit?
Twice a year covers most cannabis sites, or sooner after a ranking drop that lines up with a spam update. Put the interval on a calendar and spend the attention you save earning new links instead of re-checking old ones.
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