Did someone attack my site? Help needed

It didn't bother me much at first because it dropped in last December and I thought it's the Product Review update.

But adding my site to Ahrefs brought up some issues that's giving me second thoughts.

First, I never built any link to this site. But Ahrefs is showing 200+ backlinks. And these are low quality. GSC showed the 200+ backlinks too in December but it's now showing only 16.

Secondly, many of these links are directed at image links on my site.

Thirdly, one of these 'evil' links is directed at an unexisting url from my site:

http://mySite.com/silo/myPost/?tag=makemoney
(everything from '?' I don't know how it got there. I'm not in make money or similar niche. If I paste the url into a browser, it'll land on my most performing page that was badly hit in the 'update').

My best keywords are now in position 7-8, not changing positions since the 'update'.

It's a small 2-year-old site (30+ posts) in a slightly seasonal niche. It was fetching me about $200 monthly except in Nov and Dec when it makes $1k plus monthly.



It barely makes $10 a month now.



I'll appreciate any input. $200 is big money where I come from.

Firstly, there are many crappy sites which scrape images from the net, I don't even pay attention to them any more.

More importantly, your traffic was stable and then all of a sudden it started to go up... why?
December update kinda did a correction.

Not updating the website with fresh contents is an issue.

If you get hit, and you don't update the site thereafter, it can affect your traffic since updating your site with content can help you to recover faster.

It's possible negative SEO was done to you your site, however, a spark in the traffic can also get you a ton of traffic suddenly (good or bad)

How much traffic we speak about?
GSC shows any error?

Image hotlinking is a big issue why I say that is because I had bandwidth issue with one of my blog once.
It was just a blog and then I found 10k+ web 2.0 type sites that were using my blog images.
You can always prevent hotlinking by adding some htaccess rules as stated here: https://themeisle.com/blog/prevent-image-hotlinking-in-wordpress/
Since your GSC is now showing less of those links I don't think that's an issue.
You mentioned slightly seasonal niche was that the reason for the spike in traffic?
If I was in your place I would compare with the top ranking pages and do a content audit first then build some quality pbn links.
Then wait to see how rankings respond.

praetserge said:

More importantly, your traffic was stable and then all of a sudden it started to go up... why?
December update kinda did a correction.

Click to expand...

In Google Trends, the niche goes up in traffic in Nov and Dec and drops in January. And this is not my first site in that niche. There's always a spike at the end of the year. Why this one bothers me is that the earnings dropped significantly compared to the previous year.

Ley said:

Not updating the website with fresh contents is an issue.

Click to expand...

Yes, this is an issue for me. I was trying to put up other sites and I partially neglected this.

Ley said:

It's possible negative SEO was done to you your site,

Click to expand...

I'm looking at that possibility due to the strange url from my domain that I shared above. I don't use nulled themes and plugins but I use free ones shared on BHW or in Wordpress.

http://mySite.com/silo/myPost/?tag=makemoney

What can be adding those tags to my site url? Then why are the spammy sites linking to that url?

interlogy said:

How much traffic we speak about?
GSC shows any error?

Click to expand...

In season - 500 hits. Out of season - 50 hits. Only like 5 posts are bringing in the traffic, since I've not optimized the rest. GSC is not showing any error and my loading speed is much below 4s

MKSKS said:

Image hotlinking is a big issue why I say that is because I had bandwidth issue with one of my blog once.
It was just a blog and then I found 10k+ web 2.0 type sites that were using my blog images.
You can always prevent hotlinking by adding some htaccess rules as stated here: https://themeisle.com/blog/prevent-image-hotlinking-in-wordpress/
Since your GSC is now showing less of those links I don't think that's an issue.
You mentioned slightly seasonal niche was that the reason for the spike in traffic?
If I was in your place I would compare with the top ranking pages and do a content audit first then build some quality pbn links.
Then wait to see how rankings respond.

Click to expand...

I'll work on preventing the hotlinking as I can see that's a major issue. Yes, the seasonality is responsible for the spike. I've added the site to Ahrefs Site Audit and I can see lots of things I need to do. Then, I've already approached some recommended outreach seller here in order to start building links.

I really appreciate everyone for these suggestions. At least, I have some ideas of what I can do. Thanks