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Drop them as a client. They're paying you for SEO help but they obviously don't trust/like it. Not worth your time.

There is no one best tool for looking at backlinks. AHREFs seems to have the biggest dataset, but they'll all give you different results. If you really want to see what you have, use OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, and any others you like, put them all in one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. Then you'll have your true backlinks picture.

Exactly right. One of our sites has ~52,000 backlinks and the vast, vast majority are now considered bad in Google's eyes (years ago they weren't). We have a competitor who has only ~600 backlinks but they outrank us on some main keywords. They have some spammy backlinks, but we have a lot more so it's hurt us more. It's definitely quality over quantity of links.

A flat URL structure would be ideal, meaning .com/rho instead of adding in leves of categories/subcategories/filters. You should be able to make the URLs flat while still keeping the full breadcrumb structure of how the customer's navigated - I know it's possible because we run Magento Enterprise and have done it.

I'm gonna answer these in the most simple way possible, others can elaborate:

1. If the unrelated site actually featured you for something - ex. you sponsored a program for this travel company, they mention it on their site and link back to you - then that's fine. If it's totally random and not related, it's not fine. If links to you have anchor text that's not related to your site, that's spam.

2. Almost always disavow at the domain level. Exceptions would be if someone set up a spammy blogspot.com or tumblr.com page - those are big, authoritative domains and you don't want to block them completely. In that case I'd go with the URL level instead of domain level.

3. I'd still disavow the links, even if you delete the pages they point to. It's better to cover all bases in a situation like this.

Hard to give an answer without seeing the traffic graph for the time periods you mentioned the drops. If the drop in May was around the 22nd to 25th, it likely was a Penguin update. We got hit by it at that time.

Other things could've been dragging the site down over the last year and then Penguin may have hit and caused the free-fall. Definitely get rid of the directory links and any other links you think Google might penalize you for in the future.

1. Yes - clean now before you're penalized again

2. I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.

Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.

Google's gone after multiple link networks across the world in the last few months. Search on seroundtable.com for all the details.

Google will never get rid of all these sites and they won't go away on their own. These old school methods still work very well to rank.

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop.

If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

1. Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing

2. It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.

With that type of budget, you'd be better off learning SEO on your own through conferences, books, etc. Plus you'll save a ton of money in the long-run by not outsourcing it. You don't need an agency, SEO isn't that hard.

All backlink analysis tools will give you a different number of links to your site. Generally, I find Moz shows the least and AHREFs shows the most. For the most complete pictures, gather link data from a variety of sources and remove duplicates.

If your competitors are ranking with those tactics and have been for years, then try those tactics!

There is no white hat or black hat in SEO. There is only risk tolerance. Think of it like investing. Decide how much you're willing to risk, then make those bets.

Regardless of how much the sheep say "create good content, the rest will take care of itself", it's very misleading. Links are the most important factor for ranking well. If you want to beat these guys at their own game, you have to play their game.

Keep doing what you're doing. As long as you know how to properly identify if a site/link is good or bad, you shouldn't hurt your site. Better to do this work now and prevent another penalty in the future than to put it off.

RE: total backlinks - I recommend combining and deduping Open Site Explorer, Webmaster Tolls, Majestic, and AHREFs for the most thorough picture.

One should never rely on Googlebot for anything - we've all seen it change title tags, change meta descriptions, disobey rel=canonical, etc.

Google only responds to reconsideration requests, and you can only file one of those if you've had a manual action taken against your site. You don't get a response on disavows. You'll never get links removed from the vast majority of these directories because nobody maintains them anymore. Make a few attempts, add to the disavow list, and move on.

You may be waiting quite a while if you think Google will take care of this on its own. I guarantee they didn't build all those links in the last month, and what just came out 1 month ago? A Penguin refresh. And if they're still outranking you, it probably didn't hurt them.

Why don't you try the same tactics they're using? Obviously you should be more discreet about it, but it's clearly working for them and could work for you as well. Don't get stuck in that false mindset of white hat vs. black hat, there is no such thing. There are only levels of risk tolerance, just like in a million other aspects of business. Decide how much risk you're willing to take then build links appropriately.

While you're going through the disavow process, make sure you're building new quality links. You won't get your rankings back just by disavowing, you need new links to improve.