Negative SEO from Spammers Killing Client Rankings

[Door4seo]

Hi -

I have identified a client website which was;

a ) hacked and had several fraudulent pages added e.g. www.xxx.com/images/uggaustralia.html added which have 301 redirect links to another fraudulent websites.

b) had  an auto generated back link campaign (over 12k back links at present) with targeted anchor text at cheap ugg boots, ugg sale etc.

I've removed the dodgy redirect web pages and also undertook a link audit using Google WMT, OSE and Seo Majestic and have disavowed all the spammy links at domain level.

Consequently my client has dropped from top three for the key phrase to #9. Google WMT now sees ugg boots uk, ugg boots sale etc. as some of the most popular anchor text for the site even though it's blatantly obvious that the site has nothing to do with Ugg boots.

No manual webspam penalties are in place however the auto generated anchor text campaign is still ongoing and is generating more spammy links back to non existent web pages - which still Google appears to be picking up.

Question is - how long  do you reckon it will take for the links to disappear and is there anything I can speed Google along as this issue if not of my making?

p.s. For the record I've found at least 500 sites that have been targeted by this same campaign as well.

[MarieHaynes]

If you've removed these pages from your site then this will remove the links in Google's eyes.  (More info: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website).  It can take some time for this to be reflected in the algorithm.  You may be able to speed that process up by using the URL removal tool to remove these pages from the Google index.

It's also a good idea to run your site through sucuri.net to look for malware as often these hackings go hand in hand with malware.  If Google has detected malware on the site then they'll give you a warning message in WMT.  Google detecting malware can definitely affect rankings.

If you're not sure if you can remove the pages that these bad links are pointing to then you can add the domains to a disavow file and file that.  But really, removing the pages should do the trick.