Why? It was for the greater purpose of learning, but also the actions of an idiot knowing what the answer would be.
This actually happened back in 2020, I’ve been too busy/lazy with my personal brand to blog about it, and only just remembered it.
Therefore as part of my NEW WEBSITE & BRAND RE-LAUNCH (shout out Alex at Digital Royalty) I’m looping back to milk it for all it’s worth.
Enjoy.
What caused this?
I was working on a full time but short term project (that lasted 6 months) when I first went freelance with a great team Jules had built, which required international in-house knowledge to manage a multi-domain/region publishing project.
Whilst we worked there, the business purchased a high relevant historic domain they wanted to convert into a new site (for SEO reasons you’d either know or aren’t worth explaining). As part of this process we looked at the backlink profile and felt it looked like it could have more toxic signals than the previous owner let on – the problem was this step came AFTER the sale had been complete.
We were left with a domain that could make or break a considerable business spend, whilst understanding adding it to the network could pass on bad link vibes*.
*I know Will Critchlow said calling it Link Juice sounds lame in 2012 and we should say LINK EQUITY but it’s 2026 and I’m going Gen-Z like a trendsetter.
What did the data say?
This was right before COVID hit, and SEOs were still debating how much value the Disavow Tool had almost a decade after the Penguin update (TL;DR – The first major step that Google took to fight link spam and create the search marketing landscape we know better now).
We knew we had to be careful as some links were of clear quality – by this point we’d been a dedicated full-time team of 6-8 SEOs and content writers who knew the industry inside out – and recognised them at first glance.
And of the crap ones, some of them were entirely up for debate.
Get a dozen digital marketers in a room to make a decision based on the granular details of a subjective opinion and nothing else is getting done that day…
In comes me.
I’d just gone freelance and was more steady than expected early doors with work/finances, and found most my work coming via applying for freelance job postings or word of mouth.
SEO always was, ironically, a poor driver of quality leads for SEOs – figure that out.
Based on someone stating it’s almost impossible to A/B or rollout test changes without doing a lot of work and THEN potentially breaking it all, we needed a website that we could disavow important links on that had no financial risk in doing so.
I was still running my crappy basic WordPress template that lasted until 2026 (we spend so much time marketing others whilst neglecting our own, busy busy busy) for my SEO work and said I’d do it on mine.
WHY NOT?!
At the time it had links from my old agencies in blogs, some cited author links on big industry sites (contextual backlinks, FYI) and way more authority than I a have now. When I was asked to promote my SEO knowledge on someone else’s clock I found it easier to promote myself – being an SEO I’d ALWAYS sneak in a personal domain link – I ain’t THAT MUCH of an idiot.
But I am enough of an idiot to offer to disavow every link on my site and pull the trigger. So I did it and monitored some core terms (alongside some crap ones) with a rank tracker.
Show us the data!
Errr, here’s the sad part. I said in the intro this was 6 years ago. Those screenshots exist in the digital void now. If I ever find them I’ll add them in, but I cannot give you a play by play breakdown of the next two months, nor any traffic/visibility graphs of value. Sorry.
But I can tell you exactly what you’d expect happened. My rankings (that drove little value and few conversions) dived off a cliff…
- Freelance SEO Ipswich. Bye.
- London Freelance SEO. Not any more mate.
- SEO services Suffolk. You could bury a body where I was sitting and it not be discovered for another 6 ice ages.
After 2 months and realising I’d done something INCREDIBLY idiotic, I removed lines that screwed by backlink signals and hoped they’d come back.
I’ll be honest, they never fully came back until LAST YEAR (2025), when my piece around Zero Result SERPs got a citation from SE Roundtable.
Did this mess your lead gen up?
Yes and no.
I have done well on LinkedIn over the years locally on SEO searches, my network/client-base is solid and I never felt the keywords drove leads before.
BUT.
I have felt my contact form hits with qualified businesses needing SEO has gone up in the last 8-10 months.
As a one-man team and not a MASSIVE agency I don’t need many leads coming in – they are so occasional that deeper data investigation of Conversion Rates is pointless.
But it feels perhaps the value of being higher on the search results for Search Marketing terms could have become more valuable in the last half-decade.
And because I’m an idiot I missed the boat.
What can I learn from this?
Not a lot that you shouldn’t know already.
But for clarity – be careful if doing a link disavow.
Disavowing Links is less important these days, I’ve seen yer boi at Google Johnny M argue mostly pointless, but if you have all the high/medium priority tasks done then better-safe-than-sorry COULD be worth some minimal time/budget.
Until Google removes the tool itself I remain somewhat sceptical – John knows as much (or little) about the algorithm as the rest of the collective SEO community – those 200+ ranking signals aren’t printed on a cool word cloud poster to hang in your office.
Don’t be an idiot. Like me.
And on that note, congratulations, you’ve reached the end.
If you feel sorry for me, appreciate my bravery in the face of danger or just found this whole thing mildly amusing – please give me a link.
For no apparent reason that has NOTHING to do with the consequences of my actions as an idiot.
Thanks for reading.