Victim of negative SEO, but will this be believed if the client has not always been whiter than white?

[TomVolpe]

A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links.

The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built.

The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December.

So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.)

My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client.

I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack.

I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post!

Tom

[Chris.Menke]

In light of the fact that the client admitted that he recently paid for building spam links, it is more likely that the links being attributed to a negative SEO campaign were actually purchased by the client himself (knowingly or unknowingly) and that they are just recently taking effect.

Nonetheless, in your reconsideration request, be clear about differentiating what links the client attributes to that SEO firm's efforts and the links are attributed to the negative SEO effort, which are continuing to show up. Treat them as separate issues in the same reconsideration request.  Start out with something like "We have two issues going on--the client hired an SEO firm that built links from these specific domains [domain 1, domain 2, domain 3,....]  but we also have these other links that are accruing from what is believed to be negative SEO and which we are disavowing as they show up...."  and then explain your outreach process for the links attributable to the client.   If that doesn't work, there's always the option to drop another reconsideration request with a different tactic.