Just before Christmas 2014 we took on a new client based in London, they were complaining that enquires from the web had gone down from about 10 a day to nothing almost overnight. We did our initial searches as part of our own SEO service and found that the site was reasonably well constructed, with no obvious signs of any issue that would cause a sudden decline as described by our new customer.
We then started to look off-site and found that the back-links had been growing at a considerable rate, which were of very low quality and of no relevance to the clients business. A quick call to the clients London office established that they had been using the services of an SEO company who’s main aim was to grow links “because links are how you go up in the rankings aren’t they?”. We explained that if the links were of the right quality and relevant then yes, but as felt that this was not the case and could be the cause of the problems he had been suffering, We required access to their site’s Googles Webmaster tools to see what is had to say about his newly aquired backlinks.
Unfortunately Google was not impressed, stating “Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
Followed by; “As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to London comapany website. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.”
So that was the mystery of the Sudden decline in enquiries solved, now it was time to explain and suggest a cure to the client.
The meeting went well with the client and gave the go-ahead for us to analyse his back-links and remove those we felt were causing the problem via Googles Webmaster’s disavow tool. We explained that it may take a few attempts as we did not want to remove too many and ones which could be potentially helpful as once a link has been removed via the disavow tool it can not be reinstated, so we wanted to get only the problamatic ones. It took three goes in the end before we got the all clear.
This resulted in one happy client and also more business as we got commissioned to re-design the website itself.
