Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
-
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site.
My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed.
Craig Cook
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro -
Thanks for the reply Irving. Unfortunately, 99% of the links lead to the home page.
I'm in the process of building quality links from respected directories. This includes filling out full profile information, map info, services, etc. Using original content on everything - rewriting the core keyword heavy company profile with subtle changes on every site. Registered the site for Bing Pro, Google Places, Merchant Circle, Manta.Com, etc... Making sure to tweet and FB the posts to encourage SM participation.
As far as on page optimization, I'm waiting for the developer to roll out the new Joomla 1.7 structure. I've done all of the OPO, like selecting proper htags, generating all new meta-descriptions and titles and reconstructing the Information Architecture in an excel worksheet. I've re-written a good majority of the site content to better reflect the business goals to both users and search engines. I cant wait to implement all of the behind the scenes work and watch the progress when it goes live.
I guess my biggest concern is the long term trustrank implications of the domain being identified as a forum spammer and security exploiter. I started the process of writing letters to the forum masters apologizing for past transgressions and asking for profiles and links to be removed. I've got a 1% success rate on everything I've sent out so far. I think the best that I can hope for at this point is these very old forums upgrade their tech, purge non-participating users, and/or cease operations over the course of time. Moving forward, I'm going to spend less time worrying about these old links, and more time creating a healthy SM presence. Let's hope the search engines don't penalize the site too much for past mistakes...
-
Goog advice,
-
You say "the service was basically a backlink building farm."
If links are your major concern I ask you this - are these links pointing to your homepage or internal pages? If internal pages you can simply change the URL structure and 404 all of the old URLS and the links will no longer be pointing to your site, problem solved. If they did link building to the homepage you would need to go through them and contact the webmasters and ask them to remove which is very time consuming.
That being said, if you don't have a penalty from these links you might be OK, and 404'ing these pages would cut off your PR and could cause a major drop in rankings. Like Alan said, make sure your on page optimization is squeaky clean.
-
Thanks Alan,
The site structure is quite good as is, but we are in the process of updating from CMSMS to Joomla 1.7. In the process, we are addressing all on-page needs, w3c compliance, CSS issues, meta data, converting image text to text and removing all flash.
There were no on-page black hat tactics. The service was basically a backlink building farm. They were very successful in getting certain keywords to 1st page rankings, but left a wake of destruction in their path. We found out that the company was actually sending the work to the Philippines, because the Filipino service provider started direct calling customers when the relationship went south. Turns out the mark-up on the Filipino services was over 1000%. I regret to say that the company providing these black hat services is an Inc. contributor and featured on many news programs including CNN. I won't mention the name of the company, but it turns out the owner is more of a PR guy than a solutions guy, and a few of my current clients have suffered from their fly-by-night operations. Gives all of us a bad name...
-Craig
-
Isthere any sign of penalty, a huge drop in rankings? if not then I would not worry too much about the links, they may be worthless but it si doubtfull they are doing harm,
You can ask gogole for reconsideration from GWMT, but i doubt that is the case unless your ranking has shown a huge drop. but it does not hurt to ask. i would be more worried about on page stuff. make sure your site is not hiiding keywors and the like.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does type of hosting affect SEO rankings?
Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uworlds
Mark0 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Competition cheating on seo
So im trying to rank for O'fallon lawn care. And my competitor bought a domain lawncareofallonmo.com and now ranks number one....there is even a link to "take me to my homepage" What is going on i thought this was so 2008 not 2014.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | grnside10 -
Active Rain and SEO
I have been an active rain member for a long time. When I check my web site I can not find any links from Active Rain. I just updated my Active Rain profile and upgraded to their paid subscription. Can you tell me if this blog is creating a follow link back to my web site at www.RealEstatemarketLeaders.com the blog on active rain is here. at http://activerain.trulia.com/blogsview/4529309/hud-homes-for-sale-in-tri-cities-wa
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brandon_Patton0 -
Wanna see Negative SEO?
One of my clients got hit with negative SEO in the past few days. Check it out in ahrefs. The site is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any advice on what, if anything, I should do? Google disavow? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mrodriguez14401 -
Please Correct This on-site SEO strategy w/ respect to all the updates
Hello, I believe my on-site SEO process that I used to use a couple of years ago is not working well anymore for a couple of my sites, including this one. I'll tell you the old strategy as well as my new strategy and I'm wondering if you can give me pointers that will help us rank where we should rank with our PA and DA instead of getting moved down because of what could be our old on-site SEO. OLD ON-SITE SEO STRATEGY: Title tags usually match the page, but title tags occasionally on this site don't match the pages exactly. There's not many of them, but they do still exist in a couple of places. Title tags are either 1. A phrase describing the page 2. Keywords 1, Keyword 2 3. Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 4. Keywords 1, Keyword 2, branding The keywords are in the h1 and h2 of each main page, at the very top of the page. The h1 and h2 do not exactly copy the title tag, but are a longer phrase with the keywords appearing in their exact word order or in word variations. See this page for an example. Keywords occur 3-4 times in the body of the main pages (the pages with a menu link). Right now some of the pages have the exact phrases 3 or 4 times and no variation. meta description tags have exact keyword phrases once per keyword. Meta description tag are a short paragraph describing the page. No meta keyword tags, but a couple haven't been deleted yet. FUTURE ON-SITE SEO STRATEGY: I'm going to change all of the page titles to make sure they match the content they're on exactly. If the title is a phrase describing a page, I'm going to make sure a variation of that phrase occurs at least three times in the content, and once in the meta description tag. Title tags will be either a. Short phrase exactly matching page b. Keyword 1, Keyword 2 | branding c. Keyword 1 | branding 2. I'm thinking about taking out the H1 and H2 and replacing them with one tag that is a phrase describing the page that I'll sometimes put the keyword phrase in, only a variation in it and not the exact keyword phrase - unless it just makes total sense to use the keyword phrase exactly. **I'm thinking of only using the keyword phrase in it's exact words once on the page unless it occurs more naturally, and to include the keyword phrase in word variations two more times. So once (in non-exact word order) in the at the top, once (exact word order) in the text, and two more times (varied word orders) somewhere in the text. All this will be different if the keywords show up naturally in the text. **3. I'll delete all meta keyword tags, and still use exact keyword phrases in meta description tag, though I'll change the meta description tags to always very closely match what the page is about. Do you think my new strategy will make a difference? Your thoughts on any of this?****
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that- the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
Are the Majority of SEO Companies 'Spammers, Evildoers, & Opportunists'?
This may not be the most productive Q&A discussion, but I've had some really interesting experiences this last month that have made me even more distrusting of "SEO" companies. I can't help but think of this post (not much has changed since '09). Even though it takes a pretty extreme stance, I agree with the core of it - _"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web." _ I didn't start doing this type of work wanting to have such a negative opinion of SEO companies, but I just keep having the same experience: I'll get referred to someone who isnt' happy with their SEO company. They send me their web address, I check out the site, and seriously can't believe what I find. MISSING PAGE TITLES, EVERY CANONICAL URL ISSUE IMAGINABLE, AND 10'S OF THOUSANDS OF BOT SPAM EMAT LINKS FROM PAGES LIKE THIS...AND THIS and just recently a company a called one of my clients and conned him into paying for this piece of spam garbage, obviously scraped from the site that I made for him. and what's worse, sometimes for whatever reason these companies will have all the client's FTP and CMS logins and it can be hell trying to get them to hand them over. There's no webmaster tools set up, no analytics, nothing.... These businesses are paying a good chunk of change every month, I just can't believe stuff like this is so common...well acutally, it's what i've come to expect this point. But I used to think most SEO companies actually had their clients best interest at heart. Does every honest consultant out there run into this same type of stuff constantly? How common is this type of stuff really? Now, on to the positive. This community rocks, and I feel like it represents real, ethical, solution-oriented, boundary-less SEO. So thank you Mozzers for all you do. and I love using the tools here to help businesses understand why they need an honest person helping them. If anyone has thoughts on the topic, I'd love to hear 'em...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SVmedia3