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We have a website that is present in different markets in Europe. Therefore the content is specifically targeted to specific countries using a TLD strategy (we have site-name.de, site-name.it, site-name.es, site-name.at, etc.)

EDIT 19/6: the issue is apparently solving itself

Unfortunately I cannot see any indication of what worked. It could be the spammy-looking domain which we disavowed links from, but it can also be a glitch of Google's own algorithm. The DE-AT links appear unchanged in webmaster console (still showing a lot of links) - so we concluded it was probably not that. We are happy and relieved that the rankings are going back up, but we do feel frustrated and insecure about our future on SEO since these drops are affecting our business dramatically and we cannot really control them.

Original post

We have a website that is present in different markets in Europe. Therefore the content is specifically targeted to specific countries using a TLD strategy (we have site-name.de, site-name.it, site-name.es, site-name.at, etc.)

I ruled out any code changes that could affect the DE domain, and not the other ones - there is simply nothing in my code commits that could affect SEO (no title tags, meta, headers or any SEO-related text or link/url structure changes).

For now it is too early to see if this helped - Google says to allow few weeks when using the Disavow function.

The pages that are linked to from the Austrian domain (there are 6 pages in total with 40.000 links):

To mention that these pages (with 40.000 links) are linked to from our footer on all pages.

Update: I have added a rel="nofollow" on the footer links 2 weeks ago, but no change in number of links or ranking.

I ruled out any code changes that could affect the DE domain, and not the other ones - there is simply nothing in my code commits that could affect SEO (no title tags, meta, headers or any SEO-related text or link/url structure changes).

For now it is too early to see if this helped - Google says to allow few weeks when using the Disavow function.

Update: After 2 weeks of uploading the disavow file to Google, we can't see any improvement of the ranking.

For now it is too early to see if this helped - Google says to allow few weeks when using the Disavow function.