Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics

[SEOptPro]

A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site.

My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed.

Craig Cook
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro

[AlanMosley]

Isthere any sign of penalty, a huge drop in rankings? if not then I would not worry too much about the links, they may be worthless but it si doubtfull they are doing harm,

You can ask gogole for reconsideration from GWMT, but i doubt that is the case unless your ranking has shown a huge drop. but it does not hurt to ask. i would be more worried about on page stuff. make sure your site is not hiiding keywors and the like.

[SEOptPro]

Thanks Alan,

The site structure is quite good as is, but we are in the process of updating from CMSMS to Joomla 1.7. In the process, we are addressing all on-page needs, w3c compliance, CSS issues, meta data, converting image text to text and removing all flash.

There were no on-page black hat tactics. The service was basically a backlink building farm. They were very successful in getting certain keywords to 1st page rankings, but left a wake of destruction in their path. We found out that the company was actually sending the work to the Philippines, because the Filipino service provider started direct calling customers when the relationship went south. Turns out the mark-up on the Filipino services was over 1000%. I regret to say that the company providing these black hat services is an Inc. contributor and featured on many news programs including CNN. I won't mention the name of the company, but it turns out the owner is more of a PR guy than a solutions guy, and a few of my current clients have suffered from their fly-by-night operations. Gives all of us a bad name...

-Craig

[irvingw]

You say "the service was basically a backlink building farm."

If links are your major concern I ask you this -  are these links pointing to your homepage or internal pages? If internal pages you can simply change the URL structure and 404 all of the old URLS and the links will no longer be pointing to your site, problem solved. If they did link building to the homepage you would need to go through them and contact the webmasters and ask them to remove which is very time consuming.

That being said, if you don't have a penalty from these links you might be OK, and 404'ing these pages would cut off your PR and could cause a major drop in rankings. Like Alan said, make sure your on page optimization is squeaky clean.

[AlanMosley]

Goog advice,

[SEOptPro]

Thanks for the reply Irving. Unfortunately, 99% of the links lead to the home page.

I'm in the process of building quality links from respected directories. This includes filling out full profile information, map info, services, etc. Using original content on everything - rewriting the core keyword heavy company profile with subtle changes on every site. Registered the site for Bing Pro, Google Places, Merchant Circle, Manta.Com, etc... Making sure to tweet and FB the posts to encourage SM participation.

As far as on page optimization, I'm waiting for the developer to roll out the new Joomla 1.7 structure. I've done all of the OPO, like selecting proper htags, generating all new meta-descriptions and titles and reconstructing the Information Architecture in an excel worksheet. I've re-written a good majority of the site content to better reflect the business goals to both users and search engines. I cant wait to implement all of the behind the scenes work and watch the progress when it goes live.

I guess my biggest concern is the long term trustrank implications of the domain being identified as a forum spammer and security exploiter. I started the process of writing letters to the forum masters apologizing for past transgressions and asking for profiles and links to be removed. I've got a 1% success rate on everything I've sent out so far. I think the best that I can hope for at this point is these very old forums upgrade their tech, purge non-participating users, and/or cease operations over the course of time. Moving forward, I'm going to spend less time worrying about these old links, and more time creating a healthy SM presence. Let's hope the search engines don't penalize the site too much for past mistakes...