Resurecting an old Website

I've been trying to resurrect an old website (older than a decade). Back then the SEO was very different, so naturally, it had all sorts of profile, directory and other links that are nowadays considered useless or even harmful.

We've updated and changed more than 200 articles on this website during the past 8 months. This alone does not seem to bring it back.

Very reluctantly I have then, about two weeks ago, submitted a disavow file with a lot of spammy referring domains inside. About 1000.

Something happened a few days ago and I am unsure what caused this spike, but I am betting on the disavow file.



Has anyone who tried resurrecting an older domain experienced this before?

What we see here is in the past 3 months the daily impressions were hovering around 300, then one day they spiked to over 7500, then again the next day to over 23000, then back to around 9000. After that we are again in the 300 range. The impression spike did not result in any real click increase.

So for 3 days, we have this HUGE spike that as of now, does not seem to have done anything. Could the spike be a good sign? Or is it just a redundant anomaly?

go into the search console and take a look at wich keywords caused the increase in impressions and focus on them

The increase of impressions is 7566.67%, comparing the average and the spike. It is more or less obvious that this is not an increase for selective keywords, but an overall bump.

go to search console, click dates, from there click on the date when the jump happened, from there take a look at the queries and the pages to see which one caused it.
it was definitely not an overall jump, google doesn't magically rank all your keywords at once and then penalizes them the next day