My entire site got deindexed by Google after a bad backlink cleanup job

I was working on a client's local plumbing site in Denver, trying to clean up some spammy backlinks from an old SEO campaign. I used a tool to find the bad links and disavowed about 200 of them in one go. The next morning, I checked Search Console and my stomach dropped. The site had zero pages indexed. I rushed to check the disavow file and realized I'd accidentally included the URL of their main, clean directory page in the list. It was a simple copy-paste error, but Google took it as a major red flag. I had to submit a reconsideration request explaining the mistake and it took over two weeks to get the pages back. Has anyone else had a disavow tool backfire like that? What's the safest way to handle a big cleanup?

2 comments

2 Comments

samwalker8d agoMost Upvoted

Two hundred links in one disavow file is a bold move, my friend. I always do it in small batches of maybe twenty at a time, just in case I fat-finger a good URL into the mix. That two week wait must have felt like a year.

jake_owens8d ago

Yeah, the small batch thing makes sense. But how do you even decide which twenty to start with? Do you sort by the worst spam score first, or just go in alphabetical order and hope for the best?