SEO Case Study: How to Handle a Hacked Website and Link Farm Blacklisting

Challenge: Client’s website was hacked into with the placement of over 25,000 links. As a result, the site began to lose SEO rankings for popular keyword phrases and was blacklisted by the major search engines.

Solution: Bizresearch conducted a comprehensive SEO audit and competitive market assessment and made made recommendations that included:

Updating a new on-site SEO strategy
Focusing executive management on keywords that converted while working on restoring SEO rankings
Hiring an additional SEO expert to handle specific technical issues associated with link farm blacklisting
Eliminating paid links
Identifying additional inbound links that were not relevant, inappropriate and needed to be cleaned up
Setting up trend analysis using Bizwatch Search Analytics Reports to track improvements and drops in target keywords

Results: Over the course of 9 months the following improvements took place:

Restored SEO rankings for popular keyword phrases that were previously lost (see Chart above).
Improved SEO competitor market share of top five rankings
Client now has 257 top five rankings (originally had 111), and outranks its leading competitor’s (who only has 101 top 5 rankings)
Redirected SEO strategies to keywords that consistently lead to a conversion in both organic and paid search (PPC) results

**SEO rankings lost as website was hacked - links were placed in subdirectory rarely opened. With Bizresearch recommendations in, SEO rankings began to improve mid-2009.

Ready to partner with a search marketing agency that can positively impact your SEO and/or PPC Campaigns? Learn our methodology, use Bizwatch Analytics Search reporting tool, contact us Monday – Friday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm EST at 877-609-7027 or email us.