Nearly every answer here is about the inbound half, the junk you did not build. The half that quietly costs money is the links you paid for, and almost nobody audits those.
Google stopped punishing most junk and started ignoring it instead. SpamBrain devalues algorithmically and silently, so there is no GSC notice and nothing to appeal, just a link sitting there passing absolutely nothing while the invoice says otherwise. Google's own disavow documentation still says most sites never need the file.
So my first check is not a spam score. It is whether the page carrying the link is indexed at all.
A site: query on the exact URL, five seconds. Empty result means that link does not exist as far as rankings go, however clean the domain looked in a tool.
On aged domains I always pull Wayback for the last couple years too
Right instinct. I would push it past a couple of years though, because the question that actually matters is why the domain went dark in the first place, and that answer is usually further back than the clean looking stretch you land on.
A plumber I work with here in Canada sits at DR 43 with 39 keywords in the top 3, and there has never been a disavow file on it. The hours went into vetting what we bought instead of cleaning up after it.
Out of curiosity, is the profile you are auditing one someone else built for you, or your own?
