Their traffic recovered six weeks after a core update — they credited the disavow they ran that week

Their traffic recovered six weeks after a core update — they credited the disavow they ran that week

The myth: "we disavowed and traffic came back, so disavow worked."

A B2B SaaS site lost 30% organic, blamed toxic links, uploaded a 5,500-domain disavow file, and recovered most of it six weeks later. Case closed, they thought.

Actually, the timeline gives it away: the drop aligned to a March core update, and the recovery aligned to the next core update's adjustment — both documented and dated. The disavow landed in between and changed nothing measurable.

The giveaway: pages that recovered had no toxic links at all. Pages that stayed down were thin content.

Reality check: post hoc isn't propter hoc. Correlation with a disavow you happened to run is the most common false-positive in this niche.