Negative SEO Case Study

Negative SEO is a set of activities to lower a competitor’s rankings in search results.

These activities often build unnatural links to the site and can be fixed by submitting a disavow file.

There are times websites can look like they have suffered from a negative SEO attack and they point fingers at the competition. But with scraper sites and aggregation websites, all domains naturally pick up spammy unnatural backlinks.

In our Negative SEO Case Study, we can’t reveal the niche and domain for obvious reasons. Still, we will explain how we ranked the domain after receiving a negative SEO attack.

Our client faced an epic negative SEO attack that left their organic traffic in the dust; however, after enlisting our help, they saw their traffic and positioning in the SERP reach the highest levels.

Negative SEO Attack Case Study

SEO Best Practices After a Negative SEO Attack

Here are the SEO best practices to help your website after suffering a negative SEO attack.

Purchase a Link Audit Service

It is crucial to purchase a link audit service if you have experienced a negative SEO attack, as the audit will analyse your current backlink profile.

One of the biggest factors of a negative SEO attack is the direction of poor sites to your site; these low-quality backlinks need to be found and removed, and a link audit is a great way to locate them.

A backlink audit service will help you with the following:

  • Locate toxic backlinks that need to be disavowed.
  • Assess anchor text distribution.
  • Highlight hyperlinks that would benefit from tier 2 links.
  • Analyse toxicity levels.
  • Find gaps in your backlink profile.

A quality link audit will help you create a solid link-building strategy that will help reverse any impact from a negative SEO attack.

Our client had experienced a severe negative SEO attack in which many low-quality links had been forced toward their site. This dramatically reduced their standing on the Google SERPs and made their high-quality site seem low authority in the eyes of Google.

BUY THE LINK AUDIT SERVICE

Our client ran a link audit through our recommended link audit company, Backlinkdoctor.

Backlinkdoctor highlighted the toxic links for them and disavowed them – this improved the toxicity level of our client’s site and restored their organic traffic.

Their site continued to reclaim the authority they temporarily lost, and without the toxic links, their traffic grew past where they were before the negative SEO attack.

Every successful negative SEO case study has benefitted from a link audit service to assess its backlink portfolio.

Submit Disavow File

Backlinkdoctor submitted a disavow file for our client as part of their extensive link audit service. Disavows let Google know that you don’t want certain low-quality links included in your backlink profile.

Toxic backlinks can be seen as spammy and may result in Google penalising your site – this is what happened to our client. A negative SEO attack resulted in various spammy links being directed to their site, and as a result, they lost traffic and authority.

After contacting our recommended link company, their toxic links were identified and sent to us to disavow. After we sent the disavowed file to Google and waited for changes to occur, our client’s traffic was restored.

Usually, a submitted disavow file takes up to 6 weeks to be crawled and implemented; however, the results can be massive. Our client experienced huge jumps in the SERP after their disavowed file was read.

Purchase a Ranking Blueprint

Removing toxic backlinks is important if you have experienced a negative SEO attack; however, it is also beneficial to build out quality links to restore your site’s authority.

Ranking blueprints help highlight gaps in your backlink portfolio- we recommend the services of Searcharoo.

BUY THE RANKING BLUEPRINT

Searcharoo’s ranking blueprint helps with the following:

  • Analyses your silo structure to help find missing internal link opportunities.
  • Highlights the number of backlinks needed to rank in your niche.
  • Confirms the type of backlinks needed.
  • Suggests the costs of acquiring the required backlinks.

If you have never bought a ranking blueprint before, we recommend reconsidering, as your backlink profile may be lacking.

Our client massively benefitted from using Searcharoo’s ranking blueprint, as they found massive gaps in their backlink profile and silo structure. We could then advise on what type of links they needed to seek to improve their domain authority, and we could amend any missing internal links to form a complete silo.

Once quality backlinks had been added to our client’s portfolio, they experienced higher organic traffic and found their pages positioned higher on the Google search engine results page.

Buy Link Rejuvenation Package

Searcharoo also offers a link rejuvenation package which we recommend to all our clients.

After a negative SEO attack, you may have disavowed a significant amount of your backlink portfolio, so it is crucial to rejuvenate your links and build quality backlinks to your site.

A link rejuvenation package is a cluster of quality backlinks the backlink profile needs for a beneficial data set. The backlinks are trustworthy, low toxicity, and relevant do-follow links directing to your domain.

Searcharoo’s link rejuvenation carefully cultivates targeted anchor text that will help the freshly built backlinks recover. Their link detox packages give your site a natural-looking profile that search engines appreciate.

BUY LINK REJUVENATION PACKAGE

Our client bought a link detox package through Searcharoo and was happy with the quality of the links they received for an affordable price. Natural links were key contributors to building back organic traffic and improving our client’s status with Google.

Buy Tier Two Backlinks

Tier two backlinks are an impressive natural link in which a link is built to a link that is directed to your website.

Essentially, it is a link supporting a site linking to you. The tier 2 links tend to be sent to a site with low page authority but high domain authority. They are important to rebuilding quality link status after a negative SEO attack.

Searcharoo offers a tier two backlink package, which all our successful clients have used.

TIER TWO BACKLINK PROVIDER

The links which we built for our client throughout this negative SEO attack case study were:

  • Dofollow
  • Relevant
  • Contextual
  • High DR
  • Low Page Authority
  • Low Outbound Links
  • Non-Spammed Anchor Text

Searcharoo will only cultivate tier 2 links from pages that meet the above criteria, so you can rest assured that your new links will be high-quality. Our client from this case study used Searcharoo’s tier 2 packages to build an impressive catalogue of links that helped boost their standing in the SERP.

Build New Fresh Backlinks

The ranking blueprint from Backlinkdoctor showed us, and our client, areas which were lacking in regards to quality backlinks.

Other backlinks which we worked on achieving through this negative SEO attack case study included:

We conduct competitor analysis for our customers to find what links your main competitors have. Our favourite competitor analysis tools include Ahrefs, Link Research Tools and SEMRush.

After taking a huge knock thanks to a negative SEO attack, our client was keen to rebuild their site and establish themselves as a quality domain once again.

Our link services, alongside the services of Backlinkdoctor and Searcharoo, helped to catapult our client’s traffic to the highest they had ever experienced. They experienced extreme growth in organic traffic and sales and were once again featured on the first page of the SERP.

Continue Publishing Quality Content

We offer our negative SEO attack clients the best SEO services to help them regain their organic traffic and authority, including consistently publishing quality content.

From our client’s ranking blueprint, we found gaps in the content and created perfectly optimised content to fill missing articles.

We cultivate quality content using the following tools and techniques:

After a negative SEO attack, you want to push for highly relevant and optimised content to reclaim your standing as a trustworthy site. We created engaging, informative, and plagiarism-free content for our client, and these new posts quickly started to rank high on the SERP.

The content we made for this specific case study filled glaring gaps in our client’s domain. As we published the optimised content that met the search intent, this drove more traffic to the site and helped repair the damages caused by the SEO attack.

Popular Questions

What is a negative SEO Attack?

Negative SEO attacks involve the use of malicious tactics on your site to tarnish your reputation with Google and steal search engine rankings for important keywords to be used on a competitor’s site.

Negative SEO is known as “Black Hat SEO” and the activities are aimed at lowering a competitor’s rankings in search results.

What Activities Are Used In Negative SEO?

Negative SEO activities include:

  • Building unnatural links to the site
  • Scraping and reposting its content
  • Penalised domain 301 redirects
  • CTR traffic to reduce dwell time and increase bounce
  • Hacking the site via plugins
  • Gaining access to the site and modifying its content

How To Know If You Are a Victim of a Negative SEO Attack?

Any website should monitor its backlinks over time, and if you see any unusual spike in the number of links toward your site, this could be a sign of a negative SEO attack.

You can keep an eye on your backlinks using Ahrefs and Google Search Console. We recommend purchasing a ranking blueprint to fully assess your backlink portfolio over time.

Cost of Recovering a Website From Negative SEO Attack

The cost to recover the website after a negative SEO attack was £17,000.

The 17k costs included:

  • Link Audit Service costs £7,000
  • Link Rejuvenation Package costs £4,000
  • 5 Wikipedia backlinks cost £1,000
  • 100 tier 2 backlinks cost £2,000
  • New content creation costs £3,000

The customer was very happy with the return on investment because the affiliate website earned 95k per month at one point and dropped to under 10k.

After the works were completed, the earnings recovered, and a few months later, they hit a record revenue month.

Final Words

A negative SEO attack can be hugely detrimental to a site and diminish its authority, organic traffic, and SERP rankings. This kind of hit can be difficult for any company and impact their sales.

We work with many clients targeted by negative SEO attacks and have successfully helped them reclaim their standing in the SERP and improve their traffic past their highest point.

With the help of other SEO agencies, such as Backlinkdoctor and Searcahroo, we take our clients and work to repair their toxic backlink portfolio. By removing any toxic backlinks with a disavow file and replacing them with trustworthy natural links, we ensure that Google recognises your site’s authority once more.

If you want to follow this specific case study’s success, get in touch with our team of experts today. A negative SEO attack isn’t the end, you can build your site back to bigger and better than before, but you will need our help.

Other Successful SEO Case Studies

Search engine optimisation specialists should always keep up with the latest SEO tips and tricks.

Here are some successful SEO case studies you might find interesting:

  • The content pruning SEO case study shows how this site grew 112% by deleting content
  • The rank & rent SEO case study shows the exact strategy used to rank in April 2024
  • The negative SEO attack case study shows how you can recover from negative SEO attacks
  • The aged domain case study highlights a way to bypass the sandbox
  • The youtube SEO case study shows how you can rank videos online
  • The affiliate SEO case study shows the best SEO practices to improve existing rankings
  • The local SEO case study shows the best search engine optimisation hacks to rank GMBs and local sites
  • The semantic SEO case study shows how deep learning and machine learning will make semantic SEO a more popular strategy

The best search engine optimisation case studies try to explain everything to help users how reached successful end results in April 2024.

All Disavow Toxic Backlink Related Posts

Check out the in-depth list of related posts to disavowing toxic backlinks.

The list of articles show everything you need to know about removing dangerous backlinks that could be penalising your website in April 2024.

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