Since the December 2022 link spam update, SpamBrain detects "sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links", and their credit is lost. Human reviewers add Unnatural links to your site or Unnatural links from your site manual actions in Search Console 1 , so selling links is as risky as buying them. Google "works very hard" to stop third parties harming your site, and "most sites will not need" the disavow tool: use it only for a real or likely manual action, as a UTF-8 .txt file of URLs and domain:example.com lines. The Google Sandbox for new sites is denied: John Mueller said in 2021 that holding new pages back "is not the case".