Help Dealing with Sustained Negative SEO Attack

[simonukss]

Hello,

I am hoping that someone is able to help with a problem that is destroying both my business and my health. We are an ecommerce site who have been trading since 2004 and who have always had strong rankings in Google. Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, these have significantly decreased (I would estimate around 40% drop in organic traffic). We have not had a manual penalty and still have decent rankings for a lot of competitive keywords, so we think it is more likely to be an algorithmic penalty.The most likely culprit is due to a huge scale negative SEO attack that has been going on for around 18 months. Last September, we suffered a major drop in rankings as a result of the 302 hijack scheme, but after submitting a disavow file (of around 500 domains) on 12th November, we recovered on 26th November (although we now don't know whether this was due to disavow file or the Phantom III update on 19th November).After suffering another major drop at the end of June, we submitted a disavow file of 1100 domains (this the scale of the problem!). This tempoarily halted the slide, however it is getting worse again. I have attached a file from Majestic which shows the increase in the backlinks (however we are not building these).We are at a loss and desperately need help. We have contacting all the sites to try and get links removed but they are happening faster than we can contact them. We have also done a full technical audit and added around 50,000 words of unique, handwritten content, as well as continuing to work through all technical fixes and improvements.At the moment, the only thing we can think of doing is submitting a weekly disavow for all the new spammy domains that come up. The questions I have are:

• Is there anything we can do to stop the attack?
• Is this increase in backlinks likely to be the culprit for the drops (both the big drops and the subsequent weekly 10% drop)?
• If so, would weekly disavows solve the problem?
• Is this likely to take months (years?) to recover from or can it be done quicker?
• Can you give me any ray of light to help me sleep at night?

Really appreciate any and all help. I wouldn't wish ths on anyone.Thanks,Simon

[David-Kley]

I can take a look. Can you PM me the domain please?

[simonukss]

Thanks very much David, I've sent you a PM

[signet_int]

I'd be happy to provide another perspective if you'd like as well. If I can be helpful let me know.

[simonukss]

Thanks Joshua, have sent you a PM

[David-Kley]

It's hard to see all the results from outside, but I did notice a few instances.

Where are you discovering these bogus 302 redirects, and what tools are you using to find them? Here are a few steps I would try to help:

1. Redirecting non-www pages
2. Use absolute internal linking on your site (full links with domain names)
3. Have random, updated content on each page
4. Use the “base” meta tag

[simonukss]

Thanks for the feedback, we've just been finding them by doing Google searches.

We will start to work through the points you have raised.