SEO Sabotage. Scary stuff.

Hi Guys,

Recently decided to register BHF so bit of a newbie on the forums , but hardly a newbie to SEO, Online marketing, web etc, thought I might be able to offer something, and maybe get a bit of help out of others too

I run an local SEO company in Australia, and one of my clients approached me with a problem that really made me think, and I thought might be beneficial/interesting to others.

Basically, a quick rundown of the situation:

This company had a 'friend' who offered to do some 'free' seo on their site (they did so without informing my company). We have worked tirelessly over the last year building this company's brand and they were ranking number 1-3 on many many high competitive keywords. All of a sudden they were penalized by Google, for link spamming, and given the standard drop to page 5 penalty. After digging more, and having the business owners find out what this 'friend' had done their site and get him to 'reverse' anything that was done this is what we found:

Basically, without getting into full details what happened was:
1) Friend Hired some freelancing firm in india to 'market' their company
2) Person in India proceeded to spam the hell out of the net with links, possibly using automated tools
3) They proceeded to create multiple Social Media sites and post on blogs, create blogs.
4) This was done over a span of just 3 weeks, possibly it looks as though there was just 2 sessions of adding content and links over that time.

We noticed things popping up all over the place, although the client was reluctant to give us information about what was going on until it was too late. Shortly after they were penalized.

So, at the cost of about $50, they successfully managed to destroy their top ranking SEO.

Food for thought tho isn't it, firstly: Those who are questionable in their ethics of business, and are ranking in 3rd position but cant break first could use these tactics to gain Pole Position, very cheaply and effectively. Furthermore its a nightmare to recover from.

Has anyone had this happen to them in the last year or so after Google's Penguin update?

Discussion would be greatly beneficial. (Please don't ask for the company's contact that performed this work or how to do it.)

I remember going through something like this with one of our local clients last year. We thought a competitor was doing negative SEO because the quality of SEO was freaking terrible that we were seeing. Come to find out the company owners 13yr old son was doing extra SEO on our clients site to "help us out" Needless to say. The 13yr old kid cost our client close to $15,000 worth of loss for all the seo services we had performed, not to mention the loss of income from his site once it fell into the depths. Needless to say it took us almost 7 months to repair what the kid did, and we have our client back on page one position 9, but talk about a waste of money! "Notice to all site owners" If your going to hire a SEO professional to rank your site, dont let your kids "Help out" the big boys lol

so negative seo does work.

hellnation said:

so negative seo does work.

Click to expand...

It works to a point, meaning if its a newer site you could destroy a competitor. But if its a aged site with good link diversification it would take quite a bit to bring it down to awfully much.

So you're ranking 1-3 and he decides to use some $50 seo service....

They'll eventually drop off, continue to build the highest quality links, slowly, to override the scum that's been spammed.

All of the comments above make sense. Its easy to take down a new site compared to an aged site. It was a blatant suicidal attempt by your friend. Right now what they must focus on adding more content to the site and diversify their link profile. It is gonna take some time to resurrect. Other option would be to do a 301 redirect and start fresh.. Good luck

Also this was one of your best to signup here. Have a wonderful stay

Quality High PR Manaual SEO submission is best i tried in past for my couple of sites it has increased my backlinks. Try to use Naked URL and Generic keywords this will really help.