Is there a way to find out who is trying to damage my site
-
Hi, to cut the story short, i hired a seo guy to do work on my site, paid a lot of money, but then when he was let go all the links to the site were stripped and other work had vanished. I want to know if there is a way to prove this and to also check on any other damage that he could be doing at the moment to my site. The site was running high in the search engines and then dropped a short while after he was let go.
-
Bad SEO can be really disruptive to your ranking performance. It sounds like this person may have been using black hat link building techniques and decided to remove them once you parted ways.
There are ways to monitor and remove bad links that may negatively impacting your rankings. We have done this for many clients at GetBackOnGoogle.com to recover rankings after bad SEO work. It involves identifying incoming negative links and strategically requesting removal. In some cases you may need to disavow backlinks through Google Search Console, but the best option is to get them removed manually if possible first.
You can use the Moz Open Site Explorer to review and monitor inbound links.
If you truly think someone may have done something malicious, I would also recommend a full SEO audit to see if the setup of your website or SEO plugins have changed in any way and to make general improvements since your rankings have dropped. You'll also want to start working on content and building legitimate backlinks of your own from related sites in your industry.
Mark / AdFicient.com
-
Hi, everything vanished. the site was ranking high and then dropped like a lead balloon. Its authority dropped as well
-
He was probably paying for those links to be up while he worked on the project and then when he was let go he stopped so whoever supplied the links took them down when they didn't receive their monthly payment.
It happens quite often.Were the links removed instantly as he left or was there a space between the two events? Did the links that you had before you hired that guy also disappear?
As for website losing positions, that's an obvious reaction on losing a bunch of links all at once.
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
-
Canonical in Shop Areas of an E-commerce Site. When and Where?
Hi Guys. A quick one about duplicate content... So we have a lot of pages that are very similar on our site, but are actually different products. e.g) Our Fortnight view refills and our week to view refills. Our MOZ report defines this as duplicate content. Question: Would a canonical tag be the way to go to 'remove' this duplicate content? And if so, which page should it point back to? Just picking one of the products? Or the higher level Landing page? Many thanks in advance... Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
HTML Site SEO (NO CMS)
I have got a client site, which is dated (2007) and has not been shifted to any recognised CMS yet. It is HTML based. Is it possible to SEO on such a site? Is it even worth it? If it is possible to do SEO on this, any suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | ArthurRadtke3 -
Rel canonical tag on a single page site?
I have a wordpress theme site which essentially is all in 1 page. Do I need to use rel-canonical tag? It would just loop?
On-Page Optimization | | graftene0 -
Redirecting pages (old site to new site)
I have a question- there is one location, one set of pages for both the old and new site on the same host environment so when I did the redirect it get into a loop trying to redirect from itself to itself Not sure how its gonna affect SEO. Will pages get hit for duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Yanez0 -
E-commerce site product descriptions and duplicate content
Hi everyone. I'm developing an e-commerce site using Prestashop and concerned about the issue of duplicate content among product descriptions. My main concerns are: If there are 500 or more products and those product descriptions are obtained from a manufacturer or supplier's website hence running into external duplicate content issues. Internal duplicate content is also an issue, if there are multiple similar products and each product has the same description across several pages. What would be the best approach to eliminate the possibility of incurring a duplicate content penalty due to similar product descriptions? I've already considered the suggestion of noindex-ing the complete range of products to help protect from duplicate content penalties and having unique articles written in the site blog discussing products instead linking to certain products on the site. Another consideration I had was noindex-ing all product pages except pages for featured products in the store and rewriting descriptions for a set amount of those featured products regularly (this will still have the problem of internal duplicate content across pages if similar product descriptions are rewritten). The product range is intended to be very large so I'm really seeking an alternative solution from the insane task of rewriting many product descriptions. Any suggestions to make SEO work efficient are very much welcome and appreciated. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | valuepets0 -
How do I Avoid Excessive Internal Links on an eCommerce site?
I think I'm getting dinged for this on Term Target because the page is full of products, which have links to their product page, but I'm not sure.
On-Page Optimization | | PageLogic0 -
Monitor site loading speeds
We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server. But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors. I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low. When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. ) Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why. Does anyone know of any good reliable programs or sites that does this?
On-Page Optimization | | eunaneunan0