Please help me, Someone sabotaged my site!! :( I could cry

[Chris__Chris]

This post is deleted!

[TomRayner]

Hello Elissa.

First of all, I'm sorry to see this.  Here's what you can do:

Check in your webmaster tools for any messages from Google - the big G will nearly always contact you if they think you have unnatural links to your site, or if they added a penalty to your site.

Hopefully you have analytics installed - if you could find the date where your traffic dropped substantially (as a result of a penalty due to the spammy links) it would help with any reconsideration request.

Once you have this date, export your links from Google WMT (as it will be the most comprehensive list) and it is time to identify the spammy ones.  Looks like you have a good eye for them already, but I'd recommend this LinkDetox tool as well: you can get a full crawl of your site by just sending a tweet and it will crawl your backlinks in just a few minutes.

It will then breakdown for you what links are toxic or suspicious - toxic links are links that are pointing to your site from deindexed domains.  These are no brainers and should be earmarked to be removed.  The tool also defines what it thinks is a suspicious link - I'd recommend going through all of them, as some might be quite natural and OK, but it should help you to identify a few more bad links.

Now, you'll need to make contact with these webmasters - it's something you need to do.  Contact them, save the date of contact and make a note if you get a reply or not.  It's helpful to setup an excel spreadsheet for this, I would have in separate columns:

• URL
• Reason for removal
• Contact date
• Contact method (email or webform)
• Response
• Response date
• Was the link removed?

Do this for as many links as you possibly can.  Once done, it's time to submit disallow the links not removed. This link provides a good guide on how to submit the request (as well as a basic guide within it)

Once that's done - it's time to submit the reconsideration request.  Include ALL the stages that you've taken - how you discovered the links, how it wasn't you who built them, what tools you used to diagnose the bad links, what steps you've taken to try and get them removed (attach your excel sheet at this point) and that for the rest you have disavowed the links.

Within a few weeks, you should hear back.

Now, as you can see this is a lot of work.  I'd only ever do this if you're certain that you've had a penalty of some sort.  As mentioned, Google will always (I mean 99% certainty here) send you some sort of message in your webmaster tools that would either alert you of unnatural links, or even one where they'd explicitly say that they've attributed a penalty on your site.

Negative SEO attacks almost always result in Penguin penalties, so that's what you're dealing with.  If you're certain you've been hit, my guide above can help you get on your way (but I'd definitely look at some other guides as well - Google will appreciate you more if you've been as thorough as possible).  If you're unsure you've been hit, ask away here and we'd be happy to help.

[Chris__Chris]

Thank you for your response, I have had no warnings of Google at all, Which confuses me more, I havent done any of these back links there are 100's all pointing to low quality sites.

Its crazy if i havent added these and google havent warned me then how can this be, My rankings have took a huge turn for the worst and my site www.finaldutis.co.uk isnt even ranking for the keywords Probate (we was on page 1 number 7) I have lost nearly all my good traffic keywords, I have cleaned the site taken out any old school seo. Made sure we have no duplicate content and still my rankings are being killed off one by one, I couldnt understand why??

When i looked into recent backlinks in webmasters I nearly chocked ! I havent added 90% of them, I use no link building software, NOTHING.. If i do links ther are manuel.

If I have no warnings from Google then what do i do?? I am unsure if I have been hit can you please help, I have literally no traffic to my site now and I really dont know how i can go from 150 plus page 1 keywords long and short no nearly nothing.. I use no blak hat and even if the peguin hit me would it have removed the main keywords Probate completely leaving us behind sites that are not even probate related?

Kind Regards

Elissa Hayes