They deleted their entire disavow file. Traffic went up.

They deleted their entire disavow file. Traffic went up.

The myth: once disavowed, always keep it — removing links is dangerous.

An ecommerce store inherited a disavow file from a 2019 agency: 1,400 domains, no penalty on record. A new consultant removed the file entirely in March. By June, 38 of those "toxic" domains turned out to be small niche blogs and a regional newspaper — real editorial links. Non-brand organic rose roughly 11% over the quarter.

Actually, the old agency had carpet-bombed anything with a low third-party score, including genuine citations. Disavow is a directive Google obeys literally; they'd voluntarily thrown away link equity for years.

Reality check: most legacy disavow files are graveyards of good links someone panicked over.