Stuck on Overcoming the damn Sape links

Maybe you could just emulate the spammy site, with your own spammy site, and get that #1 back, and then feed traffic to your clients REAL site. Not ideal, but it could definitely work.

Is FakeItTilYouMakeIt still flirting?

I know your games Cougar

Should I lay down and die? Should I cross my arms and hope eventually google will care about one small business losing money? This other business has "stolen links" on pbs, reuters, discovery education endless high pr sites. I can link my butt off all day and I'm good but pbs isn't going to give me a link. These are unrelated, unearned links we are talking about here. My client is losing thousands of dollars on this and Google is in no hurry. Did you have a better idea because I'm all ears, seriously.

This one ^^^

were you hired to take back the number spot? or did this takeover happen while you were managing/being contracted to this client?either way it doesn't look good, site that get sape rankings seem to keep them, i think from consensus, it is like putting ppl back into the good ol BMR days, buy a membership drop a few links, sit at number 1.

Unfortunately you can't "try" out stuff on his site, it's his money site, we can't jeopardize it.
if he really does want to take back number, without jeopardizing his site, i would just continue doing what your doing with his site and get 2 separate sites. have his mother and father buy the domain and hosting, we kinda wanna disassociate him with his mother's and fathers new site.make it completely different from his site, if he uses wordpress, guess what one of those sites is gonn use joomla, the other, drupal. yea we're basically gonna use PBN rules here. then of course both sites would have content on it, and start getting ranked, the first one would get more links than what you were comfortable with his money site and the second one would get agressive backlinking. now i'm not talking 30k profile/blog posts, of course that's silly. i'm talking about multiple pyramids per property, not just one pyramid, that's not going to be enough, like 1 each week, and keep the previous pyramids alive with constant content. (1 post web2's are silly for tier1, make them real blogs)

i mean what else do ppl have to offer? if my client wanted his "position" back, and of course without endangering his main site, i recommend this. (of course his family would buy and own the properties, not you, so he wouldn't think you're gonna run off with the l33t rankings)

again what's his budget? and what's he comfortable with, that's the main 2 factors.

Don't worry Mike, I would never play with any of my clients' reputation or bread and butter. I only do small local business, and only honest hard working folks who do business the right way.

As for the proposed spam site... I'm undecided. If I do go for it I wouldn't link it to the main site in any way. The only contact info would be a different, previously unpublished phone number. I have never felt like I needed to play dirty but it's been months of lost revenue. And yes I think even though he has other lead sources nobody in the service industry can say Google isn't important. He's feeling the burn. The problem is, it's not just one keyword... It's all his main keywords. All the money keywords he dominated for years (fair and square). Now it's been months and that big ol spam site is just sitting there, no penalty in sight. So what do you do?

@Lanx My history with this client: I built his authority site up 5 years ago. He has had the domain for 10 years. 5 years ago he contacted me, he had lost his top spot. We expanded his tiny 12 page site to 200 pages of unique content. Got him a rock solid link base excellent timeless links, compared to his competition he was NYC and they were Branson, Missouri lmboooo He was fine for years, updating his blog and social media, getting links naturally. When he called me this time to say he had lost his spot I went through everything and he has everything on his side to be in that top spot still except for these damn SAPE links. I mean an old authority site that is still updated frequently, still pulling links and doing great with his online presence and reputation. This spam site is less than a year old, 10 indexed pages and it is ludicrous to me that it's still sitting there.

Anyways... Here's what I have to work with:

-4 other sites on the first page of the SERPS for his keywords that are on different hosting, no mutual links, probably two he'd be willing to sacrifice for a good cause. The other two have Google places so he'd want to keep those.
-Maybe 8 or 9 aged Web 2.0 that he actually uses and updates

Thank you guys for the advice, this is my niche and it drives me crazy that I can't get him where he needs to be.

What I'd recommend is building some powerful, high pr links to your clients site. Definitely not spam links, quality links.

Also, SAPE is on Google's radar right now so that is a good thing.

In addition to building additional high PR links, you can also optimize his site for additional keywords that the spam idiots aren't targeting.

If your competitor is spamming late them spam..... but you shouldn't spam..

Black hat technique works, but it doesn't have long life.