Backlink risk audit and disavow, decided line by line

What we usually find: Most disavow files we are handed are too long. Across the last thirty profiles we audited, the file already sitting in the account named a median of 1,400 domains; the file we handed back named 31. Length is not diligence here. Every entry is a link you have decided to stop counting, and roughly one in five domains we struck from an inherited file was still sending referral traffic or sat inside a live commercial partnership nobody in the room knew about. What a disavow file is actually for: It is an instrument for manual actions and an insurance policy against somebody else's link farm aimed at you. It is not a ranking lever. Since the December 2022 link spam update Google has been consistent that most spam links are ignored rather than counted against a site, and the before-and-after reads we have run on properties with no manual action agree: filing moved nothing we could separate from seasonality. We say that before the invoice rather than after it. On about a third of the audits we run, the recommendation is to file nothing. How the profile gets read: Search Console's link export samples up to 1,000 linking sites, which is enough to see a pattern and never enough to decide one. We combine it with Ahrefs and Majestic history, Bing Webmaster's separate index, and then a crawl of every candidate linking page: response code, whether the link survives rendering, rel attributes as served rather than as reported, whether the linking page is itself indexed, and Wayback history for any domain that changed hands. A domain that changed registrant and then began linking to you is the pattern that matters most and the one no vendor score surfaces. We disavow at domain level or not at all. Page-level entries claim a precision about which URL on a spam domain is the problem that nobody actually has. The sector versions of this: In fintech it is usually affiliate and comparison inventory — years of rate-table placements, some from networks that later resold their stock, plus anchors carrying regulated language a compliance officer would not sign today. In beauty it is syndicated press releases and gifting coverage scraped into a hundred content farms. For publishers the exposure normally runs the other way, so we audit outbound too: advertorial and affiliate links shipped without rel sponsored is what costs a media brand its own visibility. Not included: No link building, no outreach, no removal campaigns. Removal requests are worth the labour only under a manual action, and we will tell you plainly whether you are in one. No tool toxicity score enters our file; those numbers are a vendor's caution setting, not evidence. No recovery guarantee, because whether traffic returns depends on your site, not on our file. Who should not buy this: Anyone with flat traffic, no manual action, and a hope that a disavow explains the decline. Anyone who bought links this year and wants the trail tidied rather than assessed. Anyone who wants the file without the reasoning, since the reasoning is what you are paying for and the file itself takes an afternoon. What arrives: A decision memo written for your board, not for us. A sheet with one row per domain, the evidence, and a keep or file verdict. The file itself in the format Google accepts — UTF-8, one domain: entry per line, well inside the 100,000-line and 2MB limits — with the reconciliation of your previous file, since uploading replaces it outright. Where a manual action exists, the reconsideration request drafted in your voice and a second pass once Google responds.