Managing SEO Spam and Redirect Issues

We took a supplements brand from toxic backlinks and broken redirects to massive traffic growth in 6 months. The site was a technical mess when we started. Backlinks from sketchy sites. 404 errors scattered across pages. Canonical tags pointing nowhere. But the results after our cleanup? +53.63% organic traffic in 6 months. Here's exactly what we fixed: 1. Cleaned Up The Link Toxicity The backlink profile was dangerous. Spammy anchors and low-quality domains everywhere. - Created comprehensive disavow file targeting toxic domains - Secured 50+ high-authority health editorial placements - Focused on branded anchors to rebalance the profile 2. Fixed Technical Foundation Basic technical issues were killing their rankings. - Standardized URL structure (removed trailing slash inconsistencies) - Updated canonical tags to match redirects - Eliminated all 404 internal links 3. Strategic Authority Building We didn't just get any links. We got the RIGHT links. - Targeted health and nootropic editorial sites only - Prioritized contextual in-article links over image links - Built authority to commercial pages that drive revenue 4. Coordinated PR Campaign Executed 3 research-driven PR distributions over consecutive months. This created natural citation velocity while building real authority in the health space. The results speak for themselves. Organic traffic climbed steadily month over month. Top 10 keyword positions nearly doubled. Most importantly? Revenue followed the traffic. Key lesson: Technical SEO isn't glamorous, but it's foundation. You can't build sustainable rankings on broken redirects and toxic links. Clean house first. Then scale.

Most websites think they're optimized until Googlebot hits a wall. Broken links, redirect chains, blocked assets, outdated sitemaps, or a misconfigured robots.txt file can prevent search engines from accessing key pages. These issues waste crawl budget, break internal linking, and reduce index coverage. And that means fewer pages in search results, weaker topical authority, and lower rankings. Crawl errors come in two forms: site-level (like DNS failures or server timeouts) and URL-level (like 404s, soft 404s, or blocked resources). They often show up as HTTP status codes (404, 503), noindex directives, disallowed folders, or mismatched canonicals. Each of these errors disrupts how bots move through your site, and if left unresolved, they can lead Google to deprioritize your content altogether. The fix starts with visibility. Use Google Search Console to inspect individual URLs and review crawl stats. Then run a full technical audit with Semrush. Its site audit tool will highlight broken links, 5xx errors, redirect loops, blocked assets, and conflicting directives. From there, clean up internal links, eliminate redirect chains, correct robots.txt issues, and make sure your sitemap only includes valid, indexable pages. If you’re not auditing regularly, crawl issues pile up. Technical SEO isn’t just backend housekeeping: it’s foundational to visibility. Search engines can’t rank what they can’t crawl. If your traffic is flat or declining, don’t just look at keywords or content. Start with access. Because even the best content in the world won’t perform if it’s hidden behind broken architecture.

This summer, I witnessed a thriving business go dark... A friend messaged me, panicked. His business was dying. It wasn’t always like that. He had purchased a thriving company a few years back, running smoothly on a basic Squarespace site. Then, another opportunity came along—a competitor was looking to exit the space, and he jumped on it. Feeling confident in his growing empire, he made the call: Change the business name. Rebrand. Rebuild the website. He hired a high-end agency in New York to create a sleek, modern site and was ready for the influx of new clients. Except...it never came. After launch, it was crickets. No new leads. No traffic. His previously booming business was now a trickle of orders. Where it all went wrong... When we sat down to figure it out, the issue was crystal clear. The agency didn’t understand his SEO foundations. They’d completely overlooked where his assets were (Google Search Console? Never set up properly.), how his customers found him before (most of his traffic came through organic search), and the importance of URLs, canonical tags, and redirects. Here’s what we uncovered: - Canonical tags weren’t set up. Search engines had no idea which version of each URL to index, creating chaos for Google. http://site.com http://www.site.com https://site.com https://www.site.com were all different sites! - Old redirects weren’t implemented. Every bit of authority from the thriving site was gone. Lost reputation. Lost traffic. - URL structures were completely changed. For example, what used to be https://lnkd.in/emnRkS6N became https://lnkd.in/ecTZDebm. The result? Google was completely confused. His rankings tanked. And on the exact day the site launched, all traffic vanished. How we found the problem... We didn’t have to guess. Tools told us everything: - Google Search Console showed us what Google thought the website was about (hint: it wasn’t much). - Screaming Frog scanned the site for errors, highlighting broken redirects and canonical issues. - Search Console Keywords confirmed that nearly all high-performing keywords were no longer driving traffic. Your lesson... Your website isn’t just a digital storefront—it’s your business’s lifeline. A broken foundation can cost you leads, sales, and everything you’ve built. Whether you’re redesigning or maintaining your site, here’s your checklist: - Use Google Search Console. Set it up, track keywords, and monitor your performance. - Scan your site regularly. Tools like Screaming Frog will catch errors before they hurt your traffic. Have you scanned your site lately? Did you ever see a significant drop in website traffic, prospects contacting you, orders, etc? You may need a quick fix!

One of the sites I was working on had a competitor/bad actor link thousands of spam links to the homepage and blog pages of the site. These primarily came from international sites in China, India, Pakistan, etc. and they would link 30-40 links a day to our site in order to make us lose rankings and harm the site. Here’s basically what I did. I went to Ahrefs and look at the domains that were linking to the site. The site had about 800 spam sites linking close to 10,000 spam links to the site. So the first site would link thousands, next site would link hundreds, and so on. Thankfully, maybe 50 of those sites accounted for the majority of the spam links so I manually entered the domains into a txt file and submitted for disavowal on Google Search Console. Google usually covers most of these but doesn’t hurt to manually disavow a domain especially if they’re linking hundreds of spam links to your site. It’s a good idea to check your incoming backlinks occasionally, so you can see if this is going on. Some bad actors can be very sophisticated and drip feed you links for months without you noticing. 

A competitor tried negative SEO on one of our e-commerce clients. We outranked the competitor for several major keywords. And starting in June, the client got hit with hundreds of spammy backlinks. By September, rankings were in the toilet. So, I told the brand, "We can fix this, but it's going to take a bit of time." I went in and disavowed all of the spammy backlinks I saw. And then each week thereafter, I disavowed any additional spammy links that had come in. By the middle of October, the spammy links stopped coming in. And by December, Google had acknowledged all of our disavows, and all rankings that were lost had returned. In fact, rankings are better than ever now. So, moral of the story? Check your site for surges in spammy links every so often. And immediately disavow all of those links. It will quite literally save your keyword rankings and organic traffic from plummeting.