You were right about one thing, and I was wrong.

I was wrong about the disavow. Fully my error.

I said we could not submit a disavow for Will & Wind and that no account of ours could have done it. That was wrong, and the reason is embarrassing: I checked the disavow tool while signed in as ben@teamempathy.co.nz, which does not have the property at all. I never checked the TE account.

I have now checked properly on teamempathyaccess. It is there, we have access, and the tool shows:

I have already pulled that claim out of the client document. You were right, I was wrong, and I should have checked the account before putting it in writing. Sorry mate.

The only live question left on this is scope rather than access: the file covers 43 domains and our audit found 321 spam domains. Worth a look at whether the other 278 are worth adding, or whether you deliberately left them out because they are all nofollow and not worth disavowing. Either answer is fine, I just want to know which.

I took your advice and used Search Console. It says the same thing.

Your argument was fair and I want to be clear that I accept the principle of it. Ahrefs is not Google, its crawler is not Google's index, and I said as much in the client document before you raised it. So rather than argue about Ahrefs, I went and pulled the linking domains report straight out of Search Console, which is the source you nominated.

Here is the whole thing. Google credits Will & Wind with 134 external links from 47 domains, total, all time:

I checked every one of the ten platforms against Google's own list:

Your own point about the two tools disagreeing checks out, by the way. Of the ten genuine editorial domains Ahrefs lists, only four appear in Search Console. So neither tool is complete. But the platforms are missing from both.

What Google is actually crediting

The directory and profile links look like they are yours and they have registered, so that part of the process does work. The 270 on the free publishing platforms have not.

Your answers on the on-page work hold up.

I want to say this clearly because I came in hot yesterday and your response deserves it.

• The scope point is fair. You were assigned 30 keywords and their landing pages. The product pages that are now outranking the collections were outside that. That is a scoping failure on our side, not you ignoring work.
• You flagged the exact problem in November 2025. You told Abi that Google was ranking different pages than the ones we optimised, and she told you to keep targeting the main pages. I said if you raised something and it went nowhere I would wear it. I am wearing it.
• You cannot fully control which page Google ranks. True, and the beach blankets example makes the point well.
• Your question about why anyone gives a free link is the right question. 100 outreach emails and zero free placements is real data, and it is more useful than anything in my document yesterday.

For the record, the rankings work did land.

I stripped out every branded search and the entire car seat towels range, which the client launched themselves, so this is only what we can actually claim. April to July this year against the same months last year:

Impressions in the money band up 197%, clicks from it up 169%, average non-branded position from 30.7 to 17.6. The 40% drop in total impressions is almost entirely position 21 and beyond, which produced 37 clicks in the whole prior year.

That is a real result and it is your work. The frustrating part is that total non-branded clicks outside the new range only went from 342 to 371, because the titles and descriptions never got rewritten to convert those better positions. Which loops back to scope.

Three things, and a call.

• Your answer on section 02. Given Search Console shows zero of the ten platforms, what is your read now, and what should the link strategy actually be? Paid placements, digital PR, Pitchbox, directories only, or something else. You know this better than I do.
• The disavow scope question. 43 domains versus the 321 we found. Which is right.
• Your view on the Care Package. If the free-platform link building is not landing, it is in a lot of other retainers and I need to know what replaces it before I keep selling it.

Yes to your offer of a call. Let us do it early next week once the client meeting is done, and go through the whole thing properly rather than in documents. Bring the keyword mapping sheet and the link building sheet and we will work from those.

Thanks for taking it seriously and for the detail in your response. I would rather have this argument with the data on the table than not have it. Cheers mate.