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That is funny how that worked out. I used to live in Far North Dallas when I worked with a previous agency. Feel free to drop a private message.

Have you looked at his disavow file? There might be a problem with it and the disavow never actually went through. I know it seems pretty basic, but I've solved a lot of problems by asking a prospect if they've checked their robots.txt configuration. I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about.

Perhaps you're right, perhaps enough bad links weren't removed. Though I've heard of recoveries taking up to one year, without new links earned or more old links removed, even though the disavow was thorough. Draw on multiple link sources and check again. I've manually plowed through thousands of links in a few days. Sometimes you just have to dig in, but it would be wiser to see if the disavow was properly formatted and submitted first.

If it was properly formatted and submitted, then you have to make a decision based on the client's business. At what point does time and money intersect at $0? Can you rebuild that traffic/profit faster than that by starting over? It's risky either way, but if you can find something went wrong in the first round there's still a fighting chance.

That likely falls into the Link Scheme category. I wouldn't recommend it.

In the olden days, before search engines, our elders judged links based upon the traffic they would send. You have to consider that someone is going to click on that link. Maybe that set's the site up as an authority in one person's mind. Eventually they will run into other people that are like-minded .

Maybe these people go out and publish something, with followed links, from somewhere pretty nice. It may be a long shot, but Wikipedia tends to rank well for informational queries. The links that may follow would help later.

You have content on a site with pretty high visibility. I would ask you, how is this a bad thing?

I would tend to side with Oren on this one. When all of this stuff was new, an agency decided that the authorship their people built was 'rented land'. First, for shame. Second, they're missing out on what that author does later.

Stripping authorship is a penny wise and pound foolish tactic.

Have you tried tools such as pingdom, page speed insights or yslow? These can all give you a good idea where to start.

Oh, I see what happened. The domain was misspelled initially. I found the right site with intitle operator. I was a little confused about the difference in geographic targeting. San Francisco not being in Florida and all. ; )

But it still holds that the instagram plugin uses a vulnerable version of prettyPhoto. It's a great idea to see if there's an update, or you'll definitely want to consider a replacement.

As a rule of thumb, I don't trust anything with PHP Link Directory in the footer. There's a few correlations here:

1. The anchor text used and the ranking lost are very close.

2. The number of links (and anchor text) from one place shot up dramatically in that time frame.

3. The ***linking site's link footprint appears to be pretty terrible as well.

If you want, you can try Linkdetox Pro for 149 EU a month. Just take a couple of weekends and really sort it out. (I'm not affiliated with Linkdetox.com)

I can't seem to reproduce the same results Alex is talking about. But at the time of posting, according to WPScan, it appears your All in One SEO plugin is slightly out of date.

Though I would be more concerned with the Instagram plugin that uses a vulnerable version of prettyPhoto.

I've seen prettyPhoto exploits before, but I don't see anything out of the ordinary. Just make sure to cover that base as soon as possible.

***Actually it appears your All in One plugin is up to date. I'm in about 10 different places.

Not a problem. If that's your only sidebar/footer link, you'll probably be just fine. In regard to any link building in the future, if you would give the site your credit card number without much thought, it's should be okay. If a site looks like a site/page only exists to serve exact match anchor text, that one should be avoided. (Think blog spam and most PHP link directories.)

It seems like you're asking some things that are covered in two different places. These should help:
Moz Beginners Guide and Google SEO Guide

What really matters is what is readable, interesting and targeted to your page. Yes, you can and should slip a keyword in there. Otherwise, do what feels right.

If you're talking about the theme of a subject, you'll end up ranking for more terms than you think. The amount of people that search for 'video production city' isn't all that great when compared to the number of people that search for thousands of variants. Some may search for 'high quality video production', with or without the city.

The long tail is your friend. Write about the subject as you would naturally, usually the keyword targeting stuff will 'just happen'.

Sure, a branded link includes the brand name. 'Bob's Blue Widgets' would be a pure example of branded anchor text if the brand is Bob's Blue Widgets. Whereas 'cheap blue widgets' would be considered a money term/exact match anchor text, and enough of that can get the target site penalized.

Typical blog spam, I'm sure you've seen it. The anchor text will be followed 'money' anchor text. There will be varying topics that run the gamut from Forex Trading to Viagra. One blog may be about Forex, the next may be about a plumber in Tahiti and others could be about casinos - cruises - vacations. That's blog spam in a nutshell.

I've already crawled the site. Quite a few titles appear to be rather long. Most of the titles use San Francisco Video Production.

Only include the keyword in the title if that's what the page is about. Having a keyword in the slug is a good idea, again just don't go overboard. One page should suffice, but that alone won't guarantee the first page (No one and nothing guarantees first page results).

You have to look at domain age as well. Does one of your competitors have a couple of years on you? Do they have ten years on you? That's a big thing.

Where are you're competitors getting links? Are these links good, will they drive traffic? That's another concern.

I like to put page speed/usability in the first order, but many people say it's second order. Does your site load well/fast? What can you do to reduce page load speed?

These are some really basic things you have to consider. If you've answered them properly, your situation should improve.

These things always come down to percentages and industries. If the link in question is branded, I might not worry too much for the time being. If the target site has a lot of site wide links, I would be concerned about the next Penguin filter.

Without knowing anything else about the target site, if the statement above checks - odds are your site should be okay for now. Though I would check the Blogspot links for typical blog spam. Again, these things come down to percentages over time.

***Disclaimer: For whoever reads this, never try to game the algo. It will end up biting you. I'm not claiming the OP is gaming or has tried to game the algo. Just don't do it.

It appears you got picked up by again.com.au at the time mentioned in the graph. It's a typical broken PHP link directory. The anchor text is partially branded, with your name and includes the keywords where you've lost ranking. Hopefully this helps.

I would disavow it. Here's a how-to.

Without much more information, I can only say that Google isn't likely to ban a site manipulating signals they don't appear to value. Keep checking on the organic side.

Without knowing the target site, I guess the biggest question you have to answer is; "Why is a Korean site linking to us sitewide?"

Since my Korean is a little rough, non-existent actually, I can't rely on Google Translate to tell me if this is a followed 'sponsored link'.

Honestly, this looks like a lot of work.

Alex had the best answer to your question. Just as an aside, you really want to update All in One. There's an XSS vulnerability. Also, the instagram plugin uses an outdated version of prettyPhoto which is also vulnerable. You could wake up tomorrow and find the SRC steeped in Cyrillic.

I wasn't able to duplicate what Alex mentioned, with the ads and all. The above is just something to keep in mind.

This is really broad. Can you give me the industry? How about the competitor?

Google 'dialed down' 'social signals' a couple years ago. Social is almost nil if all they're doing is buying followers. You're far more likely to find an answer on the organic side.

I don't want to give anyone a heart attack, but the Avada theme looks like it has a lot of vulnerabilities. I'll run a scan in a minute, but would you duplicate (shorten) and shoot over the URL?