Backlink Audit Ending in a Decision, Not a Disavow File

Roughly one audit in six that we run ends with a disavow file. The rest end with a written decision that the link profile is not what is holding the site back, plus a short note on what is. Google has devalued rather than penalised most spam links since Penguin 4.0 in 2016, and its own documentation still tells most site owners not to touch the disavow tool. An audit that ends in a four-thousand-line text file because the file was the agreed deliverable is theatre with an invoice attached. What the read consists of: Referring domains come out of Search Console, Ahrefs and Majestic, get collapsed to registrable domain against the Public Suffix List, and then get looked at by a person. Classification of German-language properties is manual, because the difference between a regional property portal that has linked to your project pages since 2014 and a reseller-fed blog network is visible in the German on the page, and no toxicity score reads German. Anchor distribution gets checked against what a property, travel or interiors brand normally looks like: brand, bare URL and navigational anchors dominate, and exact-match commercial anchors above roughly eight per cent of the profile is the point where we start asking who bought them and when. We also look for expired-domain redirect chains aimed at you, injected links sitting on a hacked subfolder, scraper mirrors of your own pages, and shared AdSense or Analytics identifiers across the domains linking in. The decision, in writing: Four to six pages. What the profile is, what happened to it historically, which parts of it are actionable, and what we would do next if the site were ours. If there is a manual action under Security and Manual Actions in Search Console, that changes the engagement and we say so on day one. It is the one case where the file is not optional, and it comes with a reconsideration request written in German and English and an evidence log of what was removed, contacted or refused, which is the part reviewers actually read. The file, when it is warranted: Plain text, UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, one directive per line, domain: entries in preference to individual URLs, inside Google's 2 MB and 100,000-line limits. You own it and you keep it. We do not maintain it as a subscription: a disavow file that grows every month is a sign somebody is billing for maintenance instead of reading the profile. What we refuse: We do not run removal outreach at scale. Emailing two hundred webmasters to beg for deletions has a reply rate that does not justify anyone's day, and Google does not require removal before disavowal. We do not disavow on suspicion, and a vendor toxicity score above some threshold is not evidence of anything. We do not disavow links a competitor's agency flagged in a sales audit. And we will not disavow a domain because it is foreign, free or old. Who should not buy this: If organic traffic fell on a core update date, this is the wrong purchase and we will say so in the first call rather than take the fee. If you have fewer than five hundred referring domains, you can read them yourself in a morning and you do not need us. If what you want is a disavow file to put in front of a board as proof that something was done, buy it somewhere else; we will not write the memo that supports it. Languages: the work and the deliverables are produced in German or English. Property, hospitality and furniture clients get an audit from people who have read that trade press for years, which is most of why the manual classification is worth paying for.