One of my sites was hit with anchor text backlink spam. I disavowed 500 links (manually checked them all). The traffic drops roughly correspond to when the links started appearing. Hopefully my disavow will do the 80:20 and traffic will recover. 👇🏼
Some SEOs swear by disavow files and some SEOs say they’re a waste of time. I’m testing for myself to see what works for my site because that’s the only way. Other than drip-feeding content to the site, I won’t be doing anything else to the site for now.
I discovered it while doing an audit to figure out why the site was declining. The traffic is half what it once was.
The anchor text was ultra relevant. That was the problem! It was exact match and repeated exactly across up to 25 domains per post. So it would to Google that i was trying to spamsculpt pagerank old school style.
Regularly monitor your backlink profile and consider setting up alerts for new backlinks. It took a few weeks, but traffic eventually stabilized. Stay persistent and keep an eye on your analytics!