MASSIVE neg seo hit w/screenshots

seocrab

seocrab

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I did an analysis for a client today who reported a steady decrease in web traffic and sales over the last 6 months.

Check out the backlink profile on ahrefs.com:





Needless to say, my client's website is NOT an online casino! It's a game retailer operating in the US, so the casino links and non-English links look like pure spam to me (most of them are from blog comments). The site has not been deindexed, it just ranks poorly.

The site has good stats, however, so it's worth keeping:
DA:46
PA:31
PR:2
MozTrust: 4.57
MozRank: 2.51

My proposed plan of action is to disavow a LOT of links, then work on a social campaign and varied anchor backlink building.

TAT would be a few months before seeing any decent results.

Does anyone have additional recovery suggestions?
 
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The disavow think is the first step in my opinion. And at the same building new quality links.
 
So 6 months ago or so your client had 75k links, then someone built 10k spammy links to his site and now it's not ranking as well as it used to? I'd look into other factors before starting to disavow, like the anchor density of your client's main target keywords.
 
CoreClub said:
So 6 months ago or so your client had 75k links, then someone built 10k spammy links to his site and now it's not ranking as well as it used to? I'd look into other factors before starting to disavow, like the anchor density of your client's main target keywords.
Click to expand...

He was with another agency last year - it seems to me like they were building a huge amount of (spam) links in a short time. This led to good rankings, and then the neg seo came and rank dropped (as far as I am aware, there's no proof of course).

As you can see from the anchor density stats posted, they are all for non-English or casino terms (not relevant to the site).
 
Referring domains 6.7K? Good luck on checking the links one by one. I have a client with similar scenario but with only 1.2k referring domains and 22k raw URLS. It took me a month just to clean it Gather links>indentify spam>pivot keyword match backlinks>email webmasters to remove>document that effort>send to Google for recon.

Don't look only on spam backlinks. Also look for paid links and keyword match anchor links. My client has a PR 7, DA 60+ link on a relevant site but it was a paid link + keyword match anchor. Google gave that link as an example after my reconsideration request. Another pain in the a$$.

My last resort was to cut the pages. 404 them and never 301 redirect them to other page. Recreate the page and create a custom 404 page for the ones that you cut. Problem solved.
 
Make a bot for it :)

get all links that doesn't contain keyword, then paste in .txt after completion, send it to Google disallow tool one by one :)

Hope you will get things straight :)

Good luck for this project.
 
You will need to automate this. Manually it could take months just to disavow the links.
 
Its bad enough when they hit CPA and affiliate
but when they hit real businesses
then its shit
But i think you may be right
the old SEO company probably built them before penguin or panda

It definitely doesn't pay tp use blackhat on clients site unless they are aware
of the consequences
 
Yeah this doesn't look like a negative seo campaign to me, more likely someone built these with the intention of increasing rankings but did an awful job. Even though the site is not an online casino, the "game retailer" could easily end up as "online casino" through poor spinning, etc. That's one hell of a mess you got on your hands. There's plenty of services out there that will help cleanup your back link profile if you don't want to do it yourself, but I can't personally recommend any.
 
nanavlad said:
It definitely doesn't pay tp use blackhat on clients site unless they are aware
of the consequences
Click to expand...

BH is fine if you are doing lead gen where the consistency and quality of the leads matters more than the ranking.
 
either the person doing the linking did a really bad job or they were a target of neg seo from competitors. Its really annoying how now a competitor can grab scrapebox and blast a million links non related and sink your rankings. The should automatically just disavow unrelated or crap links
 
well i also got hit with same style spam

porn backlinks with porn anchors

i also own a game niche site completely irrelevant

although i never saw a case where you recover after got hit backlink penalty

so i didn't waste my time

also i don't have any manual penalty or never had

but i am sure i am under algo penalties
 
seocrab said:
He was with another agency last year - it seems to me like they were building a huge amount of (spam) links in a short time. This led to good rankings, and then the neg seo came and rank dropped (as far as I am aware, there's no proof of course).

As you can see from the anchor density stats posted, they are all for non-English or casino terms (not relevant to the site).
Click to expand...

I think your problem is not the neg seo but the thousands of spam links which were probably devalued by google in the timeframe that your client's site dropped.
 
I'm working on a disavow file for a client right now, he's used a couple of crap SEO companies who've done directory submissions, comment spam, blog networks, paid links, articles - practically every thing you can imagine that's likely to get you in trouble with the almighty G.

Only a few hundred sites to go through and contact, but it's still a massive pain in the bootocks.
 
Negative SEO is unfortunately the shitbox that Google created. More and more people are getting hit with these tactics. Just look at Google's help forum for webmasters. People are complaining there too, including one that just had a manual penalty revoked and is getting bombed again. We live in dangerous times...
 
assphuck said:
Negative SEO is unfortunately the shitbox that Google created. More and more people are getting hit with these tactics. Just look at Google's help forum for webmasters. People are complaining there too, including one that just had a manual penalty revoked and is getting bombed again. We live in dangerous times...
Click to expand...
We had a hand in creating it too lol...Unfortunately the only way to even remotely stop excessive spamming of backlinks was to penalize sites for it - the only thing is, it didn't stop it at all - it just made it easier to get rid of the competition. >.<
 
Doesn't look like a major negative seo attack honestly. I would begin with pulling your WMT backlinks and using a tool like link detox. I'd begin with anything not indexed/malware and low quality exact match anchors. Do you have a WMT manual penalty/notice? I had something similar with a site but i had a partial manual penalty. I had to disavow 100% of my exact match anchors and do a good reconsideration request. If you dont have a penalty, you can get away with a good disavow file. that should be a good start.
 
Op I'm at work so I can't confirm for sure, but scrapebox should be able to help u sort thru this list.

I believe the add on link checker, checkd the anchor text so u could use that to sort out crap anchor txts. Then there is another addon that checks to see if that link is a blog to comment on. So you could use thatto see if the remaining links are crap blog comments. Then you could check out bound links, pr and index.

Well it would seem to me that it would take maybe a day to automate most of the list. Then you could manually check the remaining.
 
Use linkdelete.com

Disavow won't work by itself. I have personally tried disavowing links for months in an attempt to remove a penalty for a friends site. It wasnt until we removed the links, or tried to, before a disavow was approved.

If you dont care about the site then dump it, but youll disavow your brains out and not get anywhere.
 
Dude it is easy to organize the bad links if they spammed you with anchor text. I could have a removal list for you in about 1 day lol.
 
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