Backlink Audit and Disavow Decision for Industrial Domains

Three of the last nineteen link audits we ran ended in a disavow file. The other sixteen ended in a written recommendation to file nothing, and in eleven of those the cleanup work pointed at the client's own dealer and distributor network rather than at strangers. Google has ignored most spam links on its own since Penguin went real-time in 2016, so the default answer to "should we disavow" is no, and the value of this engagement is the reasoning behind whichever answer applies to you. When the file actually matters: Four situations. A manual action showing in Search Console. A documented history of paid links from a prior vendor. A domain acquired with its own link history attached. A rebrand that pulled an old domain's profile through a 301. Outside those four, a disavow file is a way to discard links you were benefiting from. We tell you which situation you are in inside the first week, and if you are in none of them the engagement gets shorter and cheaper. What we look at: The Search Console links export, plus Ahrefs and Majestic pulled the same day so the sets can be diffed against each other. Then a live crawl of every referring URL that survives the first filter, because tools report links removed months ago and score domains that no longer resolve. Every link that reaches a recommendation has been opened by a person. For industrial domains the recurring findings are dull and specific. Sitewide footer links from a dealer network all carrying the same exact-match anchor. Kompass and Europages duplicates of a listing someone submitted once in 2011. Scraped mirrors of your own PDF datasheets sitting on aggregator domains. Decommissioned trade-show microsites still redirecting to you. A French-language mirror of your product catalogue that nobody at your company knew existed. What lands on your desk: A domain-level disavow file, where one is warranted, with a comment on each line explaining why that entry is there. A source-removal list for links you or your channel partners control, ordered by how much sitewide dilution each one causes. A reconsideration request draft, where there is a manual action, written to be signed by an officer of your company and to disclose what actually happened. And a one-page decision memo a CMO can forward without a translation layer. What we will not do: Disavow on a tool's toxicity score. Those scores are proprietary, unaudited, and in our testing track domain age more closely than anything Google acts on. Sell a monthly disavow retainer; this is not a subscription. Add a domain to a file without opening it. And we do not take manual action work from a client who will not disclose their prior vendor's invoices and outreach records — not as a moral position, but because the reconsideration request gets rejected without them and we would be charging you to fail. Who should not buy this: If traffic dropped and you have not yet ruled out a core update, a migration or a canonical error, a link audit is the wrong first spend. We say that on the call rather than after the invoice. If you want a file delivered without the reasoning, any tool exports one for the price of a seat. Language: Audits, memos and partner removal requests are produced in English or French. Canadian and European French-language directories carry duplicate listings for most Canadian manufacturers, and an English-only reviewer tends to read them as unfamiliar spam and disavow something legitimate. Timing: Two weeks from data access to memo on a single domain. Post-acquisition portfolios run longer, because each domain's history has to be reconstructed separately and the redirect chains between them usually contradict one another.