Backlink Audit and Disavow Decision for Industrial Sites

Of the last 41 backlink audits we ran for manufacturers, carriers and power sector clients, seven ended in a disavow file. The rest ended in a redirect map, a canonical decision, or a written finding that the link profile was not the problem and the traffic loss traced somewhere else. That ratio is what you are buying: a decision about whether to touch anything, made by someone who puts it in writing and signs it. Why we file so rarely: Google has discounted most low-quality links algorithmically since Penguin 4.0 shipped in 2016. A disavow file is blunt. It removes links you may be counting on, and reprocessing happens at crawl rate, so a mistake costs months you cannot buy back. We file when there is a manual action sitting in Search Console, when a prior agency's paid placements are documented in invoices, or when a domain arrived through an acquisition with a history nobody inspected. A toxicity score is not one of those reasons. We have never filed on the strength of a vendor's score and we will not start. What the review covers: The Search Console links export comes first, because it is the only sample of what Google will admit to seeing. Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush get merged at host level and reconciled against it; the gap between the crawlers and Google is usually more informative than any single list. Then the archaeology particular to this sector: directory sprawl from the ThomasNet and Kompass era, distributor microsites nobody has logged into since 2014, subsidiary domains parked after a merger, trade show exhibitor pages going back a decade, supplier-of-record listings on OEM sites, .gov vendor and procurement pages, and university extension or lab pages citing a spec sheet that moved. Every redirect chain from every rebrand gets traced back to the original 200 response, because a link landing on a URL that hops twice into the homepage is already lost. How we decide: Host by host, three outcomes: keep, remove, disavow. Removal contact is worth making only where a real publisher will act — an association, a distributor you have a commercial relationship with, a trade title that ran an old release. Disavow lines are written at domain scope rather than URL by URL, because a compromised host does not stay compromised on one page. Every line carries a one-sentence reason in the sheet, so your team can defend the file to a different agency in three years. What you receive: A host-level sheet with the decision and the reason for each domain. A redirect map for the links you are losing to bad hops. A written finding naming what we think the ranking problem actually is. And, only if the evidence supports it, a disavow file ready to upload. On the recovery engagement we also write the reconsideration request, which is a document about what changed and what stops it recurring, not an apology. Not included: Link building. Content. Removal contact at volume — we write to hosts where removal changes something and to no others. We do not sell a monthly disavow subscription; a profile that needs disavowing every month has a procurement problem, not a search problem. Who this is not for: Anyone who wants a file uploaded this week to show a board. Anyone who has already bought links and wants an audit as cover, because we will find the invoices and the finding will say so. And sites under roughly 2,000 referring domains, where the answer is usually visible in an afternoon and you should not be paying us for it.