So, I’ve seen a number of SEO’s online recently state that disavow files are no longer required as Google understands non-related or toxic backlinks on your behalf. Really?
When I ask Google whether disavow files are still required I got this response from the AI:
“No, disavow files are rarely required and should only be used in specific situations, primarily when you have a manual action from Google for spammy links or if you were directly involved in a link scheme. Google’s modern algorithms and SpamBrain are highly effective at ignoring low-quality and spammy backlinks automatically, making the disavow tool unnecessary for most websites. Using the disavow tool when not needed can even be harmful and lead to a drop in rankings if you accidentally disavow legitimate links.”
Hmmmm…as an SEO professional for the past 15 years, I’ve always used disavow files, but never really had an opportunity to actually test the results in any proven example, until now. So, I’m going to prove Google wrong!
On August 18th, I noticed a major drop in page impressions as per Search Console (SC). The results looked like this:
So, you can clearly see a slow drop off starting the last week in July then a dramatic drop off on August 15th which was a Friday. This continued across the weekend and into the following week.
I noticed the dramatic drop off on Monday, August 18th and sat back, scratching my head as to what happened!
So, I’ll take you through my thought process as to what the possibilities could be:
- Domain Name and / or Hosting Issue – Because the impressions did not go to zero, it definitely is not a domain name registration issue or a hosting account payment issue. If traffic ever does go to zero, these are the first 2 things I would check
- Changes in SEO Settings or Code – Recently I had another client’s traffic start to slowly drop away over a 4-6 week period. I also noticed the keyword rankings start to disappear from the SERP’s. If the site is built with WordPress, one thing to double check would be any Elementor auto-updates which may have crashed the site (highly suggest turning off Elementor auto-updates).
- Solution – I then started my investigation and found that the meta titles and meta descriptions (which were meticulously unique and specifically written for each page and product) were no longer showing on the physical pages. So, I next went into the on-page code and noticed that the meta title and meta descriptions in the code had been commented out…wtf? I contacted the client and learned that recently they had used an off-shore programmer to do some stuff on the site. I don’t know if this was done maliciously or by mistake, but in any case we removed the comment out characters and republished the site.
One problem I had was that the client was receiving heaps of junk traffic from a particular country at the same time, so we implemented a country blocker plugin. So, part of the drop in impressions was due to that junk traffic being removed, which simply added to the confusion. It’s when I noticed the keyword rank tracking tool was no longer tracking the keywords, that I knew something else was going on. We fixed the code issue on July 29th. You can view the results below:
Sitemap Not Displaying – Another reason for a dramatic drop in traffic can be related to a broken sitemap file. Sometimes SC just disconnects the sitemaps, or a portion of the sitemap, so the fix is to monitor the sitemap connection in SC and make sure the connections are live and SC can see all files listed in the sitemap. In this instance that was not the issue.
Manual or Security Actions Were Taken – Google uses humans to review manually websites and try to identify if sites are doing anything dodgy, or if there is malicious code injected on the site they can give a Security strike. You can view both of these in SC. Neither was the issue in this instance.
Review for Toxic Backlinks – So, the next thing I did was review all backlinks from the past 2 months and VOILA! I found over a 100 toxic backlinks that had been created in July with 70% coming from porn sites. I contacted the client and asked them if they recently had a negative experience with a business partner or employee, because these links were created in such a short time, AND some of the links were from sub-domains which would have been created by hand at the hosting level.
I’ve seen this happen in the past, where a business relationship goes sour and one party tries to attack the other. They did not have any such experience, however one of their competitors is very aggressive with their digital marketing, so we had to assume this is probably where these toxic links were coming from.
Solution: As a professional digital marketing company in Australia, we offer several different SEO packages, and this client was on the lowest level package which includes a backlink review once per month. Our higher level packages include that service multiple times per month. So, I reviewed every toxic link then updated and uploaded the revised disavow file on Monday, August 18th. By the way, no single backlink tool monitor shows all backlinks. Especially SC! We use 5 different tools to analyse our clients’ backlink profiles.
This is where the actual test came into play, because I had no idea if we could recover the impressions or how long Google would take to disavow the files. I assumed it would be 2 weeks. You can see the actual results below. It took 7 days!
I downloaded the revised links sheet from SC after the recovery, and noticed that those toxic links were actually removed from the list, so Google not only disavowed these backlinks, but removed them from their list. This was very satisfying to be able to identify a problem, diagnose that problem correctly and implement a fix that worked!
Toxic Backlink Take Aways
I hate to say it, but you can’t trust Google’s AI. Two other things that this example proved was one, negative SEO does work, and two, disavow files can be used to effectively recover from a spammy backlink attack.
The one thing I’ve learned, in my 15 years of praying to Google, is every aspect of SEO HAS to be tested and measured. You can’t just do an AI search and take the answer as the absolute truth.
Another aspect of this experience is expressed by how the SEO team at Purge Digital looks after our clients. I’ve just described 2 scenarios where we proactively noticed something going wrong with our clients SEO results and we were able to investigate, test and fix these situations.
Again, a reminder that no single backlink monitoring tool will identify, so even if you are paying for SEM Rush or MOZ, you have to utilise a range of other tools, and I mentioned we use 5 different tools to review our clients backlink profiles.
If you notice a severe drop in traffic or impressions in a short amount of time, please reach out to Purge Digital and we can conduct a site and backlink audit at no charge!
