Note that most toxic or spammy links are going to be automatically ignored by Google, although a backlink profile that’s really heavy on the super-weak link side might cause Google to lose trust in your site, and think you’re paying for manipulative links. With negative SEO attacks, typically it’s going to take a huge number of toxic links to start to have an impact–however, negative SEO attackers generally sell toxic links in packages numbering a million or more. So, if Google ignores 90% of the million nasty links your competitor had built pointing at your site, there’s still 100K of them out there. If your profile only has 100K GOOD links, then it’s still going to look like half your backlinks are trash.
I offer manual penalty recovery work on an hourly rate basis ($425/hour). The time it takes me to review backlinks and update your disavow file depends mostly on the number of linking domains you have. If you’ve got 1000 domains linking to your site, it’s probably going to take me around an hour to review them.
The Search Console graph above is what your rankings look like when you’re under a Google keyword specific algorithmic penalty. It’s a very sudden drop, as opposed to the gradual drop over several months that you’d see if it’s just a matter of Google trusting your site less and less, due to spammy backlinks.
This is an example what your rankings look like when you recover from a keyword-specific penalty.
Manual Penalties
Here, you will have a Manual Action showing against your site in Google Webmaster Tools. For this kind of penalty, I will analyze your backlinks, identify the ones that are likely the problem, create and upload a disavow file, and then file a reinclusion request with Google on your behalf.Requirements
- access to your Google Webmaster Tools
- access to your Google Analytics
- an email address @ your domain, including full ability to connect to your SMTP server (not just webmail)
Algorithmic Penalties
Here, you will NOT have a Manual Action against your site showing in Google Webmaster Tools. Instead, we will identify this kind of a penalty via a sudden traffic drop for one or more keywords, or a sudden traffic drop site-wide. For this kind of penalty, I will analyze your backlinks, identify the ones likely to be the cause of the penalty, and create a disavow file.Requirements
- access to your Google Webmaster Tools
- access to your Google Analytics
- no manual actions showing in Google Webmaster Tools