So firstly, remember that Google's rankings are a competitive environment. It might be that others are rising as the query-space has been identified as lucrative by a number of competitors, rather than that you are 'dropping'
Another factor to consider is algorithmic devaluation. If you haven't had a message from Google within Search Console saying that you have had a penalty of some kind, then Google aren't adjusting your rankings to be lower than they were before.
When sites which previously gave you SEO authority are deemed as 'manipulative' by Google, the pipe from their site to your site (which was previously sending across ranking power) is switched off, so you drop. No one has edited your rankings to be lower, it's just that previously 'suspect' links have been switched off by Google. From Google's POV those links should never have contributed to your rankings, so it's not an attack on you - it's Google balancing the table to 'how things should always have been'
I recently wrote an in-depth post on this phenomenon, you can find it here as my primary answer to the asked question. I recommend you have a read of that one!
I can confirm that at our agency, from late Summer last year to the end of the year (Autumn to Winter period) we did notice an increase in terms of negative SEO attacks. 2-3 of our client's sites were hit and on one of our client's websites, the attack actually worked and drained some of their ranking positions a little. We recovered from it pretty fast via accurate disavow work. The main offending network was this crappy one which as you can see is just a series of spam domains linked together with billions of pages listed, in Google's least-favourite manipulative 'link-list' format
For reference we purged a load of globe-related domains:
- https://d.pr/f/PLkscH.txt (list of globe-related domains we disavowed)
I'm giving you the above as our timelines somewhat converge for very similar issues, actually if you'd be open to it I'd like to compare lists of disavowed spam domains to see if it was part of the same attack
This list isn't exhaustive, we actually did a much more thorough job of the work than just that. We fetched tens or hundreds of thousands of backlinks from all relevant tools (SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, Majestic SEO, Google Search Console) and aggregated all the data. We then used Google Analytics (site-visits / sessions metrics) and URL Profiler (fetching metrics like Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Page Authority, Domain Authority, Ahrefs Rating - all from different data sources) and boiled each link down to a single 'SEO Authority' metric
Once we had that we began deciding which links were 'fake' ore 'negative SEO' links and we disavowed them in a very, very targeted way
The problem is that, when you get penalties or algorithmic devaluations, Google won't explicitly tell you which links are the problem. If you get too aggressive and do the disavow work in a non-data-led, non-targeted way, you can end up disavowing some links which were giving you some SEO ranking power. That makes you dip down further
Even with out solid tools and methodology, we _still _usually experience slight dips from disavow work. But after it's done, limiters on performance are removed and then you can begin to see it trend up again. Especially if you replace some of the bad links with good ones (or compensate for having less authority by introducing better content), you very quickly start to see the site recovering
IMO it sounds like you have had:
- Spammy inbound links and / or negative SEO
- Which led to algorithmic devaluations, not a penalty
- Which was then back-plated with low quality disavow work
- Which then hit you harder than was necessarry
- Which then nullified your content efforts
I'm not a gambling man, but if I had to roll some dice - that's what I'd say
This is the kind of lengths we were going to, in order to get an accurate disavow which killed negative links whilst preserving decent ones:
- https://d.pr/i/o4GM8p.png (screenshot of Excel)
This particular sheet has over 5,000 rows of data, but before we began our cull it had many more (into the tens or hundreds of thousands of rows of data, from memory)
A lot of the colouration is conditional formatting, designed to make stuff stand out. There were also rules saying stuff like, actually if this link is already a no-follow it therefore can't be a risk so don't disavow (basic logic)
If this doesn't look like the lengths to which your agency or freelance partner went to (with very sensitive disavow work) then the work wasn't done right
Sorry that I haven't provided a clear-cut, out of the box answer to your query. Hopefully the knowledge and resources which I have shared here, will be some use to you on your **quest for restored **rankings