This client of mine had a really harsh penalty because they were not able to even rank for their brand keyword on Google. All in all, they lost rankings for 400+ keywords. So they needed to get it fixed. Here’s what I did to take care of the issue.
Suspicious Traffic Drop
The thing that really caught my eye was the fact that the organic traffic (see the blue curve) plummeted after the site started actively getting these backlinks (see the green curve) after around April 2021.
(I’ve hidden the site URL and branded keywords later in the post for client confidentiality purposes)
Then I checked what kind of links the site had been getting around 3 months before the issue occurred. Guess what? Many were spammy and from really suspicious and low-quality domains (with a really high Spam Score). That was a pretty safe bet to conclude that the issue was caused by those low-quality links (possible negative SEO attack).
SIDENOTE:
As I said before, they lost rankings for multiple keywords (400+).
The Solution
I manually went over all the bad links (links with high Spam Score) to make sure that they are really worth removing and eventually disavowed them with Google’s Disavow Tool
SIDENOTE:
The site was originally added as a domain property (as opposed to URL-prefix property)
And Google’s Disavow Tool does not allow using domain properties.
So I ironed out the issue with the site’s main web dev guy and he added the site as a URL-prefix property to Google Search Console so that I can use the Google Disavow tool.
By the way, there was no need to remove the original property (the Domain property) but we just needed to add a new one (a URL-prefix property) as an additional property on Google Search Console.
SIDENOTE:
Other than disavowing the toxic (bad) links, I highly recommended building new links from the domains (sites) the site’s SEO competitors had backlinks from. Speaking of which … Your SEO competitors are the sites that rank higher in Google search results for your target keywords (the keywords you’d like to rank for).
The Verdict: Success!
The site was back on track with ranking for the brand keyword (brand name).
and other relevant keywords
The Bottom Line
As a result, I got the issue fixed, and another super happy customer 🙂
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