Toxic Link Myth Busting
Meta Title: Toxic Link Myth Busting – Vamossy Case Study
Meta Description: Do toxic link really exist? Which links should you disavow in order to improve SEO performance?
Industry: E-commerce (Virtual gaming products and services)
Website: www.rpgstash.com
Domain Age: 22 Years
Domain DR: 43
Challenge: Increase organic customer acquisition and improve search engine rankings for key products and categories by disavowing “toxic” links.
Project: Disavowing links
In theory, in order to achieve your goal with disavowing links, you need to identify toxic ones. Let me tell you: There is no such thing as a toxic link in 2024! This case study will show how both an agency, and a new SEO manager caused major damage to our client’s SEO by believing the myth that toxic link disavowing helps ranking.
I would also like to note, that toxic links might have existed some years ago for some niches, or in some unique scenarios. But the case studies we found on the topic, where improvements can be seen after disavowing, can easily be attributed to domain aging.
The first disavow happened in 2020 by a prominent SEO Agency, killing about half of our 600 backlinks. The result? 50% drop in clicks, avg. 3 position drop for each keyword. Suddenly after facing this, the prominent SEO Agency disappeared, like they have done all they can.
The second disavow happened in 2024, when a freshly hired SEO manager disavowed most of the website’s links despite our sound opposition, and the website owners let him do it. As you can see below, the result of the disavow was an immediate crash in traffic by roughly 40%, and this was just the beginning!
Project: Fixing disavowed links, damage control
At this point we were allowed to fix the situation as best as we can. Our steps for the successful recovery and continued improvement later were as follows:
Remove all links from the disavow document
Get the strongest 10% of our links surely re-crawled by google (We used 5 page indexers and other methods to make sure that they get re-crawled)
Note: Once google re-crawls a link, you will be able to see it being logged by google in search console.
Get as many links indexed as possible at a reasonable price. We did this by using the 3 cheapest indexer services on all the 30k affected links, and we managed to recover 80-90% of them.
Once we have done the 3 steps, most of our backlinks and link equity has been restored in about a week, and the crashing tendency of our SEO performance discontinued.
Results
Once we have done the 3 steps, most of our backlinks and link equity has been restored in about a week, and the crashing tendency of our SEO performance discontinued, so we could go on and continue to increase traffic with sound methods.
Conclusion
Let google decide how much a backlink is worth, and how to calculate your backlink equity. If you try to mess with that, chances are that you will be punished.
Our suggestion – Only use disavow in very rare instances, like if you receive a manual penalty and have no other means to remove spammy links.
Note – Unless you receive a penalty by google, all your links are valuable.