Backlink audit and disavow file for French-language domains

Nine of the last twelve backlink audits we finished ended with nothing submitted to Search Console. That is the ordinary result, and any shop that returns a full file every time is selling the cleanup it decided to sell before it looked. When a disavow file is the right answer: The file is a written statement to Google that a set of domains points at you for reasons you cannot defend. We build one in three situations: a live entry in the Manual Actions report; an acquired domain whose previous owner's invoices show link buying; or a documented push of scraped, anchor-stuffed links at one money page over a short window. Outside those three, filing costs you links you earned and calls it hygiene. How the audit is built: We take the link export from every verified Search Console property, including the http and non-www variants people forget to verify, and merge it with the Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush indexes, because no two of them agree on the French web. Every referring URL is then crawled live and four things recorded: whether the link still exists, what rel value it carries, the anchor, and the sentence around it. Wayback dates it. A body link that has been live since 2017 on a title with a masthead needs no defence, and most of what tools flag is exactly that. What we look for in French link profiles: Annuaires from the 2009 to 2013 wave, still passing anchors nobody would write today. Communique-de-presse syndication, where one release sits on forty subdomains. Netlinking packs resold between agencies, recognisable because the same blogs turn up in three unrelated clients' profiles. Expired .fr domains rebuilt on their old topic with a new footer and the same host. In hospitality, reciprocal directory swaps between independent hotels; in property, agency-network footers that link every branch site to every other. The threshold for inclusion: A domain enters the file only when two of three conditions hold: documented payment or exchange, no identifiable editorial staff, and an anchor profile on your domain more than half exact-match commercial. One condition on its own is an observation, not evidence. What you receive: One row per referring domain with the evidence that put it there, the crawl date and the archived snapshot. A domains file in Search Console format, at domain level rather than URL level, with the reasoning written into the file as comments so whoever opens it in two years knows what you were thinking. A written recommendation, which is often to file nothing. Where there is a manual action, the reconsideration text, written to be read by a human reviewer in under two minutes. Not included: Removal outreach. We stopped in 2021 because it funds the people running the networks and because Google has said for years the file alone is enough. Also excluded: ranking recovery promises, negative-SEO attribution to a named competitor, and any work on your on-page or content problems, which is where most alleged link penalties actually live. Who should not buy this: Sites under roughly four hundred referring domains, where a careful afternoon in Search Console tells you the same thing. Sites that have never bought a link and want a tool score cleared. And anyone whose traffic fell on a date matching a core update, because the file will not touch it and we will say so in week one rather than month three.