Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings

[kheberger]

My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information.

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[BeanstalkIM]

Hey Karl, Dave here.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it's pretty tough to get a feel for the issue without more info.  If you'd like to PM me the URL I'm happy to take a quick look.  I may respond back here to help others but I won't list off any details that could be considered proprietary or confidential.

Cheers !

Dave

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[BeanstalkIM]

As Josh will find out, it'll be hard to post a public response as it would likely require revealing more than I'd feel comfortable doing but interested to know if Josh and I ended up with the same general take on the potential cause.

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[kheberger]

So I found out from the client that they were working with an SEO company that was practicing black hat techniques. In 2013, this company was creating articles and web pages on many low quality domains and pointing links to the client's site. Could this company pulled all of these links when they stopped working with them? Is that even possible?

[BeanstalkIM]

Ah, I thought it might relate to links.  Did your client let them go in the spring of 2014?

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[kheberger]

It was around that time. I'm thinking a new domain might help them start off on the right track?

[BeanstalkIM]

I'm always hesitant to switch domains and you do have some good links in there that would be a shame to lose.  If you have a manual penalty (which i assume you don't) then it might be something to consider (though still not my favorite path) but with just an algorithmic kick in the butt I'd audit the links, disavow the low quality ones and build up from there.

As a warning I'm sure you're aware of, when you disavow the bad links you'll likely be disavowing links that are actually passing weight currently.  The site might see a small drop in rankings after but that's better than a massive drop with the next Penguin update.

[kheberger]

Thanks for all of your help Dave!

[BeanstalkIM]

My pleasure.