Do you feel like your PageRank suddenly dropped after some sort of shady deal to optimize your site for more traffic? Or did you find your links on irrelevant or spammy websites? If the answer is yes, then you might have been a victim of black hat SEO!
Before you proceed to resolve this issue, make sure you get to know it and consult with experts who will help you understand what is actually happening. This article can help you discern your first steps in the recovery process, so you can protect your site and reduce any damage that might have already occurred.
Black Hat & Negative SEO Recovery
The first thing you want to do is to control the situation, which means if your domain or website is under the control of somebody who does not have the real knowledge of doing SEO or even web development, you have to take over.
Ensure Access to Your Domain
Ensure you have access to your domain through platforms like GoDaddy, Google Domains, Cloudflare, or whichever system you are using.
Web Hosting and Backups
After that, you want to make sure that you have access to your website hosting, your website itself (for example, in WordPress), and then make sure that you have backups of your website, in that order specifically, because when you get access to your website, you can, in theory, download it with a plugin.
Mitigation and Access Removal
Next, you want to mitigate the issue by removing access from the person who has control of your domain. Each platform, like Google Domains, Cloudflare, or GoDaddy, has its own tutorials, which you can find by searching online. This should be your top priority.
If you do not do that, somebody could just hijack your website and tell you that, until you pay them a hundred dollars, three thousand dollars, or in some cases even more, they will not give you back the website.
SEO Audit and Assessment
So, after you do the control and mitigation part, you will have an audit part, which means that someone experienced in SEO will have to come in and assess. Google, Bing, or Yahoo will never assess this for you. You will have to hire somebody to do the assessment.
However, if you have access to your Google Search Console, you can check it yourself. We have articles on our blog that explain how to do this.
Understand What Really Happened
After the audit, plan with a professional to understand what happened. Get a second opinion from someone randomly selected, such as a web developer who can do some research and check the situation.
It is not always necessary to have an SEO expert check it. Anyone with a head on their shoulders, who can Google, is tech-savvy and has industry experience, can help. You do not need to hire a top-notch SEO for $2,000 to solve it. YouTube has many easy-to-follow videos, and, as mentioned, we have articles that can assist. Also, do not be afraid to reach out for help.
Different Issue, Different Solution
Then, you must act. Each black hat SEO or negative SEO situation requires different solutions. If I have an issue like a paid link scheme or a general link scheme, these are different things that involve different approaches. If you paid someone for links or vice versa, both sides can be affected, some more than others, depending on the type of links.
Sometimes, you might pay $39.99 for backlinks (which are technically the same as links). The person you paid could then spam your website with spam and bots, causing your site to appear in link reports on unrelated websites. In such cases, you may need to disavow those links or ask the websites to add a nofollow attribute, which is often impractical if there are tens of thousands of links, and you do not want to spam them as well. Spamming those websites could cause further issues, as they may retaliate. You do not want to deal with that.
This is where you need someone to disavow links, add nofollow attributes, and handle the situation. For instance, if you have many affiliate links that were never reported, a good WordPress developer could quickly implement nofollow attributes on all your blog articles.
On another note, some issues are unrelated to links. For example, cloaking involves hiding text on your website, possibly to manipulate page rank across different pages. Some companies create gate pages that send links to a specific website. For instance, if you want to rank for certain keywords, you might create 20 different websites to funnel traffic to the target page. This is also a harmful practice. If Google penalizes you for this (though it’s rare), they won’t necessarily notify you, but your rankings will drop. Black hat SEO recovery isn’t always about penalty removal, as penalties are on the higher end of issues.
Black Hat SEO Might Be There Even If You Do Not See It
Black hat SEO issues might be invisible to you; you may not even realize they exist on your website. To reiterate: control everything by ensuring you have access to your domain and website, mitigate by removing access from the individual, audit with a professional who is at least tech-savvy and has web development experience, plan the fix with a professional SEO (which may take time to find), and then act on that plan.
