Reverse-engineering a competitor's disavow told us exactly which links to avoid

Reverse-engineering a competitor's disavow told us exactly which links to avoid

Word is an SEO team that noticed a rival's toxic-looking donors kept disappearing from the rival's live profile. We dug into the pattern.

What we reconstructed:
— the rival had ~90 referring domains visible 6 months ago that no longer pass to them
— those 90 were a specific cluster: a comment-spam network and two reciprocal-link directories
— meanwhile their clean DR60+ donors stayed put across every snapshot

The read: you can't see a competitor's disavow file, but you CAN see which low-quality donors stop counting for them over time. That negative space is a map.

The outcome for the team: they blacklisted those exact 90 sources from their own outreach list and saved a quarter of wasted prospecting. The rival paid for the mistake; we read the receipt.

Profiles tell you what worked AND what got cut. Read both. Watch this space.