One of my clients just got hit with negative SEO. Best/quickest way to recover?

Few thing you can do includes clean up backlinks. There are various services available to do this. If those bad quality sites don't respond then disavow them however I don't think many people had success with it. Lastly submit a reconsideration request by explaining your situation. We'd love to hear your experience.

The only thing you can do is be proactive and start attacking it head on, my site was hacked by hackers a few months back because of a Wordpress vulnerability.

I wasn't paying attention to my analytics or inbound links on that site and it wasn't until my hosting company shut down my hosting because of abusing resources did I see that I had been hacked, they injected sales pages on my site and send hundreds of thousands of links to my site. Which is essentially just like a negative SEO campaign.

My rankings plummeted for all of my main keywords and it wasn't until I removed links that I started to recover. I just wish I was paying more attention sooner! I used a link removal service called linkdelete but you can manage the campaign yourself if you have the time and resources.

Don't waste time though, if the person that is doing negative SEO is smart they can really screw things up for you.

You can write them a thank you note because if you weren't manually penalized you can actually use this negative attack to benefit you.

a) You can disavow the links (time consuming and might not find them all)
b) Build even more links, diluting the anchor text back down to 1%

Option b allows you to aggressively build links, diversifying your anchor text, negating their negative seo attack. I would also ensure to get social network signals from major networks and social bookmarks as well during your new link building phase (helps mitigate against penalties).

You will most likely come back even stronger in the rankings once you dilute the anchor text backlinks. I had a website with 40%, and got it down to 6%. Just takes persistance and a game plan.

Mike, I didn't say it has to be "crappy" links. You can be aggressive and still go after quality links. Thank you for assuming

If your anchor text is dangerously high, north of 25% for one of the negative seo terms the priority is to get that lowered.

Contacting the webmasters where he placed the links? That's going to result in spinning your wheels. Contact someone on some random link farm from fiverr as if they care, it's not going to happen, or a low quality social bookmarking site, or the Xrumer forum profile links he got you, which are probably the types of links built for this negative seo attack.

The best defense for negative seo is a good offense. Become an authority website. You need to build more links, quality when possible, but most importantly get that anchor text diluted asap. Even "crappy" link profiles with low anchor text out perform obvious SEO'ed campaigns with high anchor text.

Contacting webmasters is going to result in 10 hours wasted, unless you think it got posted without their knowledge?...don't see how that is going to happen.

Call the police

Call Google.

Explore the links and try to remove. If not possible build better links with focus on the main keyword so you get diversity.

You can use bulk SEO links providers.

Here is my litmus test for whether I need to worry about cleanup and disavow:

Did you take a hit in rankings/traffic? In your case yes, but it's only been one day. I'd leave it for a few days to make sure it's not just a temporary shift on that SERP. Don't panic yet and start making hasty decisions. We all pay when people start disavowing willy nilly.

If it is a noticeable, ongoing drop then is there anything else that could account for the change other than those links? Causation vs correlation. We all get antsy about links but there are lots of other things that could be to blame, make sure you are looking at the big picture.

Did Google try and tell you via WMT? This is an obvious thing but super important so I'm including it.

If you are reasonably sure it has to do with the links try this first:

Build a few really good links, like really good ones. Make sure they are indexed and watch your rankings. It could be a case where you had some links devalued and things just happened to hit you at the same time (seriously.) If you see upward movement then I wouldn't be quick to ditch those links just yet. Let it play out for a week or two, of course nobody wants those kinds of links sitting in their profile but it's important to figure out how urgent getting them removed actually is right now. I think disavow is serious business, removal is best even though time consuming.

If you decide to go the removal route you can scrape the who is info from the linking pages and send out a form email. Make it sound ike serious business. Tell them you are going to disavow and that can hurt their network. It's worth a shot. I usually do two rounds at least of these emails before throwing in the towel and deciding whether to disavow. Keep track of your efforts so you can include a list of your actions in your disavow report.

Anyways that is how I see it.

75%! yikes. I guess there are always exceptions to the rule.

yes, reread and 6% does seem low so it might be a toxic link issue. If OP can chime in we wouldn't have to play the role of Miss Cleo and guess everything

I could pm you some examples of toxic links ranking for competitive phrases but don't want to let the genie out of the bottle (tests on random domains, not clients). Btw, I enjoyed your video on Scrapebox local citations.

Thanks for all of the input and recommendations. My apologies - it looks like I excluded some valuable info. Here is a more complete summary of the situation:
- I have been using extremely white hat links the whole time - nothing spammy
- Up until this morning, the website has been ranking well and steadily moving up in the serps
- Over the last 30 days, I have personally created less than 50 baclinks to the site, yet ahrefs shows over 950 links added over the last week.
- Here is an example (hxxp://body-forming.ru/forum/posting.php?mode=reply&f=4&t=15951) of one of the spammy sites pointed at my client's site. There are several others like this that use an anchor text that is 10 random letters long (example - mneuttmmrg)
- The links using this 10 letter anchor make up 6% of the overall anchor text. Previously, over 50% of the anchor text was just the brand, the 3 main keywords that I am targeting, and the URL.
- These sites are total spam farms, and their associations with viagra, payday loans, etc. are probably the reason I dropped.

What kind of drop are you talking about? From #3 to page 10? From #3 to #8? One keyword or all of the keywords?

Severe. Here are some examples:
- #11 to NTH (not top 100)
- #13 to NTH
- #40 to NTH
- #8 to #86
- #14 to NTH
- #5 to #32
- #5 to #88

...and that is just a handful of them. There were 4 pages ranking, and based on the drops in ranking 3 of them were affected. The rankings for one page is still intact.

Oddly, only the home page got hit with the bad links, but it looks like it has affected the rankings of the home page and 2 others

I'd give it a week and watch for movement, then if the rest of the links are foreign language spam trash like the one you posted I'd send one round of emails just to have something to show to Google and then Disavow the whole lot. It's not an overnight recovery either. (just so you know)

In the meantime, you might try to figure out why the other two pages are being affected when the other one isn't. If it's because you are linking to those pages from the homepage you might remove the links temporarily (of course don't leave them orphans set something else up)

Boss,

You are at a very early stage so it would be easier for you to do the mitigation.

Its a simple 4 step process

1. See if there is any penalty alert in your webmaster tools
2. Clean up as many bad links as possible. Get data from all sources (Webmasters, moz, ahrefs, majestic)
3. Disavow the bad links
4. File a reconsideration request (in a timeframe of 2 weeks after completing the above steps) telling Google the detailed action you took to get rid of bad links and why they should reconsider you.

If still you face any problems, contact me

Search Engine Land linked up a fairly long complete guide to manual link clean up - you might want to start there it's a pretty in depth process though so for some people it's easier to start again with a new domain -- SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 17, 2014

While your trying to clean up the junk links (good luck) start working on getting a 2nd page ranked for the same keyword. Assumes the site still has indexed pages & no WMT warning.

If the original page bounces back to it's previously ranked position you'll be stronger in the SERPs with that 2nd ranked page, If not, at least you'll have the new page ranked.

Another idea to consider If all else fails:
Here's how to swap out ranked pages on Google SERPs