Backlink audit, disavow file and manual action recovery

The likeliest correct output of a backlink audit is no disavow file. Google has said since 2020 that its systems discount most spam links without being told, and the tool exists for sites carrying a manual action or a real history of bought links. Of the audits we ran in the past eighteen months, four ended in a filed disavow. The rest ended with a written finding that the file would have cost the client links it was still earning from. When this is the right purchase: You have an unnatural links manual action in Search Console. You have acquired a domain and inherited a link history nobody can account for. Somebody is pointing an obvious injection campaign at you. Or you are on the sell side of a transaction and the buyer's diligence will run this anyway, so it is cheaper to know first. Outside those four, we will usually tell you to spend the budget on the gap analysis instead, and we have. Where the data comes from: Search Console's link export first, because it is the only view that is Google's own, and because its sampling and its cap are limits worth understanding rather than pretending away. Then Ahrefs and Majestic for reach and for historical links since dropped, Bing Webmaster Tools for a second independent crawl, and Common Crawl where a specific link is disputed. The source that decides most cases is not a tool at all: your own invoices, supplier emails and old agency reports. A link you paid for and cannot evidence is classified as paid. What we classify: Paid placements without correct attribution that we can tie to a purchase. Sitewide footer, blogroll and theme-credit links from a shared network. Injected links on hacked hosts. Expired domains rebuilt and redirected at you. Directory and bookmark tiers bought in bulk years ago that were never taken down. Every classified link carries its evidence: the URL, what it looks like, what ties it to you, and whether removal was attempted and by whom. What we will not do: We do not disavow against a third-party toxicity score. That number is a vendor's model of a Google signal rather than the signal, and disavowing by threshold is how sites lose the links that were holding them up. We do not disavow scrapers and mirrors. We do not file at page level where a domain is uniformly bad, and we do not file at domain level because one bad page sits on a publication you would be glad to be cited by. What you receive: A written finding with the recommendation and the reasoning behind it. Per-link classification with evidence. A removal outreach list where removal is realistic and a note where it is not. The disavow file itself in the format the tool accepts, with a comment line on every entry so that whoever opens it in three years knows what they are looking at. Where there is a manual action, a drafted reconsideration request with the evidence table attached, and one revision after Google responds. Not included: Ongoing monitoring, worth buying separately if you have been attacked once. Recovery of traffic lost to a core update, which is not a link problem and cannot be disavowed into remission. Any prediction of how a reconsideration will be decided; we control the quality of the submission and nothing past it. Not for you if: You want the file without the finding. We will not sell a disavow to a site that does not need one, and roughly two thirds of the sites that ask us for one do not.