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7 days is still a short amount of time in Google Time. It took us about 2-3 weeks to see a noticeable change, so I wouldn't give up just yet. The only problem with trying something new is you won't ever know exactly what it was.

Have you done a crawl test on the website? http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Step 2 may be to try removing or asking for a no follow on links from lower domain authorities like http://the1.co.uk

Many website design companies do this with clients, putting "Web Design By company name" and adding a link either to the exact anchor text, or their company name. We experimented with this and found that there is a diminishing return on links like this, because our clients websites have nothing to do with web design.

This would probably be the same case for privacy policies for websites. Because the clients websites won't have anything to do with legal documents, it may not be the best linking strategy.

I do think giving it away for free is a good strategy. Instead of demanding them to provide a link from their website however, I'd try to get them to promote it on social media. Make easy share buttons from the documents with text like "We just got a free privacy policy for our website from (link to your clients company)"

Hope this helps

We had this happen to 4 sites recently, where the canonical tags had been tampered with during a content management update.

Best Guess:

Looks like there is no canonical tag on http://caesarsweddingfavours.co.uk/Home telling Google that it is pulling this page from http://caesarsweddingfavours.co.uk. You have a proper redirect from www./caesarsweddingfavours.co.uk to /caesarsweddingfavours.co.uk, but no canonical tag on http://caesarsweddingfavours.co.uk/Home, making it look like duplicated content.

Read more here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I'm seeing the same thing.

From what I see in the Google Blog, that sends you to here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3141229

Local monthly searches and global monthly searches: These two columns have been replaced by the "Average monthly searches" column, simplifying the search volume data you can get. The average monthly search volume is specific to your targeting settings, and you can get data for an entire country or individual cities and regions within a country. Note that you can still get global monthly search data by targeting all locations.

But based on past numbers, this is not an average at all. "Flooring London Ontario" should have the same local and global searches... Yet, it went from 1300 (Keyword Tool) to 210 (Keyword Planner) local monthly searches.

Keep us updated on anything you find! This would make a great Blog Post for someone who has the time to do a proper investigation

Jarod,

It looks like there's some suspicious links to your website, including one "link network" from city.lucarelli.com. It may look like a link network to Google, especially when there's the same exact match text (Wedding Decorations) for each one.. I'd also remove links from linkpartners.com. I just took a quick look, but there's a few links from lower domain authorities than you which probably aren't helping your site.

Hope this helps! From my own experience, it's been taking 15-30 days to get sites back after an algorithm change like this... So be patient is the best advice I can give you, after you clean up your link profile.

Thanks, but the links have already been removed. They were there long enough to cause significant damage on Google.com though. Now we'll have to wait for Google to crawl the site again...

I'm more interested in finding out if it was indeed negative SEO, or it's linked to a specific directory or.... ???

I looked at removeem.com and it doesn't look like it would be useful for this, as they're short term attacks.

We had another website attacked by negative SEO, so now I'm getting a little suspicious. The website went from around 26 linking domains to 1001 links from 311 linking domains in webmaster tools. They're all in different languages, and directories.

I asked everyone at the organization and they said they didn't sign up for any services. I trust them, because I know they don't have time to breath right now, with 7 product launches this month.

OSE says 79 links from 26 linking domains, so the spam links must be gone now.. but the website's been wiped pretty much clean from Google.com and is just starting to slowly (very slowing) crawl back

Is there anything else that could be targeting the website with hundreds of links? Anything I can do to protect it? I've disavowed the links, but they're gone now so it probably won't help.

Thanks in advance for ideas

UPDATE:

The website is still not recovering in Google.com. It seems to be ok in .ca, but a recent conundrum is that it's been basically wiped clean from Bing and Yahoo rankings. I've emailed Bing and the team says it is indeed indexed, and not penalized (manually anyways). OLE says the "bad links" are no longer there, but webmaster tools still lists them all (I know, they don't update that often).

My latest strategy is to start building some really strong links into the website with killer content. Their products are amazing (tv lift furniture) so it shouldn't be difficult. Just time consuming! I'm also being super-active on their social media platforms, to see if this helps boost rankings in the mean time.

Any further tips to recover from negative SEO?
(Note: I do not need link removal tools. We have a process that's working just fine).

Hey Eric,

Try Ubbersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org/)

We use this and find it a huge time saver! We populate our list and then plug it into Adwords keyword tool for traffic and competition estimates. If you're only concerned with suggestions and if they auto-complete though, Ubersuggest will do the trick!

Zack,

They're actually linking to a dynamic inventory page which is updated daily with new products. Sometimes they link to a specific piece of inventory which is ultimately 404'd when the product is sold and link doesn't exist anymore.

Wish it was that easy, but the links keep coming

Hi Tim,

If you log into webmaster tools and look at Traffic > Links to your site you can see who's linking. Make sure you click on "More>>". Alternatively you can use Moz's OSE and run a backlink report on your site.

It was immediately clear that this was happening again as we had 26 links from videogamersoasis.com for a power sports website...

To submit a file:

Webmaster Tools > Traffic > Links to your site, click on "Download latest links" and then filter out any links you actually put there. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 and submit the file.

Only do this is you KNOW you've been attacked and you can't contact the website owners to take the links down.

Many website design companies do this with clients, putting "Web Design By company name" and adding a link either to the exact anchor text, or their company name. We experimented with this and found that there is a diminishing return on links like this, because our clients websites have nothing to do with web design.

This would probably be the same case for privacy policies for websites. Because the clients websites won't have anything to do with legal documents, it may not be the best linking strategy.

I do think giving it away for free is a good strategy. Instead of demanding them to provide a link from their website however, I'd try to get them to promote it on social media. Make easy share buttons from the documents with text like "We just got a free privacy policy for our website from (link to your clients company)"

Hope this helps

Jarod,

It looks like there's some suspicious links to your website, including one "link network" from city.lucarelli.com. It may look like a link network to Google, especially when there's the same exact match text (Wedding Decorations) for each one.. I'd also remove links from linkpartners.com. I just took a quick look, but there's a few links from lower domain authorities than you which probably aren't helping your site.

Hope this helps! From my own experience, it's been taking 15-30 days to get sites back after an algorithm change like this... So be patient is the best advice I can give you, after you clean up your link profile.

I'm seeing the same thing.

From what I see in the Google Blog, that sends you to here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3141229

Local monthly searches and global monthly searches: These two columns have been replaced by the "Average monthly searches" column, simplifying the search volume data you can get. The average monthly search volume is specific to your targeting settings, and you can get data for an entire country or individual cities and regions within a country. Note that you can still get global monthly search data by targeting all locations.

But based on past numbers, this is not an average at all. "Flooring London Ontario" should have the same local and global searches... Yet, it went from 1300 (Keyword Tool) to 210 (Keyword Planner) local monthly searches.

Keep us updated on anything you find! This would make a great Blog Post for someone who has the time to do a proper investigation

We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc.

I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website.

Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now.

I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time.

'.'< --Thanks!