They disavowed every link above a 70 toxicity score. Lost 14% of traffic.

They disavowed every link above a 70 toxicity score. Lost 14% of traffic.

The myth: high toxicity score equals harmful link.

A media site trusted the dashboard and disavowed all 2,900 domains scoring 70+. Three months later non-brand organic dropped 14% and 9 previously strong pages slid off page one.

The post-mortem: the score's biggest inputs were low domain authority and a high outbound-link count — which also describes forums, comment-driven communities, and resource pages that were sending real referral traffic and relevance signals.

Actually, "toxicity score" is a proprietary number no search engine recognizes. Google has flatly said they don't have one. The site optimized for a metric that exists only inside the tool.

Reality check: if your KPI is a vendor's invented number, you'll get a vendor's invented outcome.