Dtox showing 64% of backlinks are TOX1 but still ranking

[jasonwdexter]

A local business has been smashing the SERPs for a while now, but since May (updates) it has been sliding and search visibility has plummeted.

They came to me for help, so I ran a Dtox report and it's showing a lot of bad links (2,863 links in total). TOX1 are deindexed website so it was being linked to from a huge private blog network.

MY question is, with only 209 decent links pointing to them, are they ranking because Google hasn't picked up all the shitty links or DESPITE them?

I assume that after Google deindexes a domain, that link is wiped out in their index? Which is the reason for the huge drop in rankings and visibility. However, they are still there or there abouts for 40% of their keywords.

Whats the best course of action here, do you think? They haven't had a penalty (as far as I know). Should I proceed to disavow? Leave them to drop away and juts build quality links? I don't want to disrupt anything at the moment, they still do well in bing. They say their rankings are slowly sliding.

Any ideas would be good!

[DennisSeymour]

Check their analytics, see how far they've fallen. Monitor the rankings first and study it.

If you see dancing URL's (changing urls, dropping to 50-200 then to the original ranking) etc then that's an obvious penalty.

You might want to start with cleaning out and ironing out the existing links, try to improve those.

Get new strong links, all the while analysing and creating a spreadsheet for the bad links to submit.

Since this is local, it might just be because of the local changes, the business listings ,etc that hurt their visibility. You might want to optimise their local seo process + links first and see if they improve. If they do, then that makes things easier.