Backlink Audit and Disavow for Inherited Link Profiles

Roughly one audit in five ends with a disavow file. The rest end with a written argument for not filing one. Disavow earns its place in three situations: a manual action, a documented campaign against you, or a domain whose history you bought rather than created. Used outside those, it mostly removes links that were already being ignored, and occasionally one that was not. What the audit reads: Your Search Console links export, one commercial index for the history the export does not keep, three years of the domain in the Wayback Machine, your anchor text plotted against dates, and — if you still have them — the invoices from whoever did this before us. The invoices are the fastest route to the truth. A profile becomes readable the moment you can see what somebody was paying for in 2022. What we look for: Inherited inventory: clusters sharing a registrar, an IP range, a CMS fingerprint or the same three footer links. Anchor spikes that begin on a date and stop on a date. Links from expired domains rebuilt on someone else's archived content, which is the standard way a crypto domain acquires a past. Links pointing at URLs that no longer exist, where a redirect chain has been quietly carrying equity somewhere nobody chose. And the pages of yours that rank only because of links you would not buy again — the ones with an exposure nobody has priced. When we file, and what goes in the file: Only on one of the three triggers, only at domain level, and only with a line of reasoning per entry you could put in front of a regulator or an acquirer. We do not disavow at URL level. We do not use a toxicity score from any tool. We will not add a domain because a dashboard coloured it red. Where there is a manual action, we also draft the reconsideration request, including the part most drafts leave out: what was done, by whom, when, and what has changed so it will not happen again. What you receive: A domain-level verdict list split into leave, monitor and act, each with reasoning. A written assessment of which of your ranking pages are standing on borrowed authority and what happens to them if it goes. A file only where triggered. And a one-page summary written for somebody who is not an SEO — in these sectors the audit tends to end up in front of a compliance officer or a due-diligence team, so we write it to survive that room. We will not: Audit without Search Console access; the export is not optional and the engagement does not start without it. Assert that a competitor is attacking you without evidence — negative SEO is real and considerably rarer than it is invoiced for. Recommend a disavow to justify a fee. Or work on a domain whose owner will not say what was bought before we arrived; we will find it regardless, and the concealment costs both of us a week. Who this is for: Operators who inherited a domain through acquisition. Brands recovering from a manual action. Teams changing agency who want to know what is on the balance sheet before a new programme starts. It is also the right first engagement if you are about to buy a domain, or a company that owns one, and the price of the audit is a rounding error against the price of the mistake. Who it is not for: Anyone who wants a toxic-link score to show a board. That number is a vendor's opinion with a percentage sign on it, and we cannot produce one with a straight face.