How tdo you replace an old SEO company's work?
-
I have a client that has been paying someone for what is basically directory placement on very specific niche sites that they have created. These sites are exact match keyword domains with not very high PA or DA (they're in the teens) and they provide no direct traffic. It's basically a link wheel that is probably helping them to rank for some of their bigger holy grail keywords. They are also providing some low quality article/blog marketing on these sites. Ultimately, they link to them ALOT and it's working in this specific niche. This client no longer wants to pay for these services, but there's the possibility of all of the links being taken down and their rankings being set back a ton. Has anybody ever experienced this and if so, how did you deal with it? What are some good tactics? Any tips would be great.
-
We did have that kind of experience. While all of your links are low end, we had a major problem because some of their links were good.
So we came up with a 6 week strategy. Simultaneously we started a content campaign and vertical business partnerships with links to the site.
After two weeks the client company gave a month's notice period to his old SEO company.
Once the period was over we did fall in ranks gradually for a fortnight (that was panicky) but we also started ranking for some alternative keywords (hence the client's business did not dry out).
We regained most of the rankings after 6 -8 weeks.
The downs of this strategy was the client had to pay two companies for 6 weeks, Their businesses went down for three months; but close to a year they have made up for the cost.
My tips would be to 1)mentally prepare the client for the loss; you can add the ROI sheet to your proposal. 2) include some other keywords in your campaign so that you can gain rankings immediately and the client's business does not dry out.
-
I agree with Nakul.
These types of links are dangerous.
It is probably best to start backing out now, working to replace bad links with quality.
-
The best bet is to have an alternate strategy in place to build content and authoritative links. There's always that little bit of risk of drop in rankings in scenarios like these, which is going to happen one day anyway. The question is what to do till then.
I would look at starting to add more content, strengthen the pages as well as working on the overall domain authority with brand links and citations etc.
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
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Hit by negative SEO
I think my site got hit by a negative SEO campaign. We got nailed by the latest Google update and our traffic dropped significantly. We don't buy links, ask for links, do link exchanges, etc. Since the last update was all about spammy backlinks, I downloaded backlinks from Google Webmaster Tools just to see if there was any info in there. There are tons, hundreds, thousands of backlinks from spammy sites to us. Sites that are spammy as heck and sell backlinks on the footer. I can only assume someone went after us with a negative SEO campaign. We're the #3 site in a hot market. Is the only way to combat this to disavow all those spammy backlinks with the Google disavow tool? We also have a manual penalty on our site as well. I've asked for a reconsideration request and have heard nothing. Please advise.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Redesigning my site, and not sure what is best for seo, subfolders or direct .html links?
,I have 4 examples to choose from, what is best:? http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | hoodamath0 -
What to do if you've been hacked.....
Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked. All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans. Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO. This looks like a bad neighbourhood site: 3 pages indexed PR 0 And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text: payday loans I assume its a wait and see at this stage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Is my SEO strategy solid moving forward (post panda update) or am I doing risky things that might hurt my sites down the road?
Hey all, WIhen I first started doing SEO, I was encouraged by several supposed experts that it was a good idea to buy links from "respectable" sources and as well make use of SEO experimentation offered on Fiverr. I did that a lot for the clients I represented not knowing if this was going to hurt. But now after the latest Google shift, I am realizing that this was stupid and thus deserving of the ranking drops I have received. In the aftermath, I want to list out here what I am doing now to try to build better and stronger rankings for my sites using white hat techniques only... Below is a list of what I'm doing. Please let me know if any of these are bad choices and I will immediately dump them. Also, If i am not including some good options, please let me know that too. I am really embarrassed and humbled by this and could use whatever help you can offer. Thanks in advance for your help... What am I doing now? *Writing quality articles for external blogs with keyword links back to sites *Taking the above articles and spinning them at SEOLINKVINE to create several articles *Writing quality articles for every site's internal blog and using keywords to link out to other sites that are on different servers - All articles are original, varied and not duplicate content. *Writing quality, relevant articles and submitting them to places like Ezine *Signing clients up for Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, etc so they have a social presence *Working to fix mistakes with onsite issues (mirror sites, duplicate page titles, etc.) *Writing quality keyword-rich unique content on each page of each site *Submitting URL listings and descriptions to directories like JoeAnt, REALS and business.com (Any other good ones that people can recommend that give good link juice?) *Doing competitive research and going after highly authoritative links that our competitors have That is about it... HELP!!! Thanks again
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | creativeguy0 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0
