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
-
Question on site structure
My client is a nationwide company. They provide building maintenance services in 7 different cities. In each city they provide a different range of services. They currently have a single service page for each service and no mention on that page of the cities they offer the service. The service pages are getting no SERP visibility. We are running Paid Search and recommending SEO. I'm wondering whether it would be beneficial to build out specific service pages for each city so the content is more relevant to both users and search engines. What is best practice in this situation? Client wants to dominate SERPs in each market for the services they offer.
On-Page Optimization | | SEOinSunnyNelson0 -
Reducing number of site pages?
Hi, I am looking through my site structure and I have a lot of pages left over from the days of article keywords. Probably 7 or 8 years ago, someone sold my husband on article key word pages. I have slowly gotten rid of a lot of them as they have fallen out out of the ranks. I would like to get rid of the rest, probably 5 or 6 pages. Will it hurt my rankings to delete pages and redirect them? My customers really like the simplicity of our site and I want to keep it that way, plus clean up flags that Moz is telling me is a problem. I think its easier to keep less pages top notch than have to worry with a lot of them. Especially since my customers aren't viewing them. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CalicoKitty20000 -
How to find all broken images?
Are there any free tools that will crawl a full website and report back on any broken tags? My site recently added several thousand previously archived posts, many of which contain old tags that no longer exist. ScreamingFrog's crawl is too limited to reach most of these posts, and I haven't been able to find another free tool to get the job done. If there's no free tool, does anyone know of an affordable paid alternative?
On-Page Optimization | | WebElaine0 -
How to analysis Responsive VS Dynamic site?
Hello Experts, Can you please throw your knowledge on How to analysis Responsive VS Dynamic site? Also please suggest best tool to optimize both type of sites plus if I have to optimize manually then what is the best way? It will help lots of people as currently google focusing more on mobile site so we can optimize our responsive and dynamic site. Pls suggest. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | adamjack0 -
SERP change that removed commercial sites from the first page?
Suppose that Google made a change and all of a sudden a certain type of keyword phrase doesn't show any commercial sites on the first page of SERPs. Have you ever had this experience? What would you do in this scenario? Would you give up on those keyword phrases and target a different keyword phrase?
On-Page Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
I changed my site from HTML to PHP and I need to get some help.
Ok...so the other day I went from HTML to PHP in every part of my website. I want to know the best option for me for redirecting my pages from HTML to php. I had my site scanned with SEOMoz and I was given many 404 errors which is not at all good. I do not have any pages of my site linking to any of these html pages. All of the site links have been updated. I have checked 3 times. I have never created a robots.txt file so I would love to get a little help with this part. I was thinking it would be best to tell Google not to worry about these pages in the file. I kept the pages up and I plan to remove all code with them so that no content shows up if someone visits but the issue with that is my site is already indexed as HTML. I want to have the HTML pages redirect to the PHP without worrying that my visitors will land on my site via Google onto an HTML page. I hope I am making sense. What is the best advice you can give me. I need all pages to redirect to PHP. I used an htaccess redirect from all HTML to PHP but when I get so many of them added I get an error on my site saying too many redirects. Seriously need help.
On-Page Optimization | | TrendyHost0 -
How to make google not index quotes from other sites?
Hey guys, I have a site where we post quite a lot of info from other sites. We don't want google to de-index our pages because parts of it are quotes from other sites. What would you use to make it so Google sees it's a quote from another site? Or to just make Google not index the quote? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | StefanJDorresteijn0 -
Articles on our own site?
Hi Guy's Is it better to have articles on our own website under a news section, with keyword phrases that point to relevant pages or is it better to post them on our blog (that is seperate, we use blogger) and point them to relevant pages on our site? or maybe a bit of both? Thanks Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | LushDuck0