Is Your Site Being Spammed To Death From Competitors? Fill In The Form

Looking To Hire An Expert SEO Or Web Designer In Sydney For More
Targeted Leads? We Don’t Sell Our Services. We Solve Your Sales Problems!
We Can Boost Your Customer Acquisition
Need More Paying Customers ? No Problem
Want More Revenue At The End Of The Month ?
We Can Help With Increasing Your Online Leads And Sales. We Have Helped Businesses Rank 1 For Over 20 Years To Date. Hire An SEO Specialist That Gets The Job Done

How Link Spam Can Wreck Your SEO Rankings: A Real Case Study

Have You Been Hit With Link Spam?

Outside of website SEO audit services that need to be performed with new clients when they come on board with the best SEO agency in Sydney Australia, off page SEO audits are also necessary. It is a simple fact in organic SEO, that nobody who is your SEO services competition likes you once you make the top in search engine rankings. We currently at the time of writing this post rank 1 for SEO Sydney or Sydney SEO. Can’t quite remember which one. We also often find this to be an ongoing problem with our small business SEO services that once our client ranks, somebody will inevitably attempt to foil those rankings, using mass link building by ways of link building software. We even wrote a Money Robot review on this as well. If you know for certain you have been hit with link spam, reach out to us for our negative SEO Recovery service for link spam

In SEO, there’s nothing worse than seeing hard work undone by dirty tactics from either a competitor or a disgruntled previous SEO agency from a new client you have onboarded not too long before.

Recently, we worked with a plumbing client whose rankings were sabotaged by link spam. Their previous SEO agency not only failed them but actively tried to tank their success after the client ceased with their previous SEO Provider and moved to PK SEO.

Here’s the full story and what you need to know about the dangers of link spam.

Say Goodbye to Copywriting Headaches

Meet CopyBase: The Affordable AI Tool Built for Real Conversions — Learn More.

Cleaning Up a Messy Situation

Take a look at the graphs to the left here. This is the damage bad links do to rankings.

Like it is not hard enough to rank a site these days that we have to have the odd disgruntled SEO agency that performs dirty tactics like this and hires spam link-building companies to intentionally cause damage.

When this client approached us, their site was in a bad place. Subpages had been de-indexed, rankings were practically nonexistent, and their previous SEO agency’s “strategy” had left them high and dry. Here’s how we started to clean things up:

Re-indexed Subpages: We got their important pages back into Google’s index. We did this by generating unique content. All their pages had plagiarised content.
Content Optimisation: We made sure their content was keyword-focused and high quality.
Building Trustworthy Links: Our goal was to create a clean, authoritative backlink profile coming from quality resources with decent enough Trust flow, not just DA.

In just three months, the results were incredible. Rankings for key terms like blocked drain plumbers and plumber for blocked drains improved dramatically. But just as everything was stabilising, disaster struck.

When Link Spam Strikes

Dramatic turnarounds in ranking signal serious red flags. Suddenly, out of nowhere, rankings started to plummet. Straight south they were going. This sent us immediately to check on back links as well knew there was nothing wrong with the site itself.

After investigating, we discovered hundreds of toxic backlinks pointing to the client’s site. These weren’t there before. Someone had launched a deliberate attack, and we traced it back to… their previous SEO agency.

Yes, you read that right. The agency they left wasn’t just upset—they were trying to sabotage their success. And it didn’t stop there. They also targeted PK SEO and even the websites of other clients in our network. This was a full-blown assault….and it REEEALLY pissed us off !!

You just don’t do that to clients let alone target another SEO company as well, together with their other clients. You are just SCREAMING for trouble to come your way….and we sent it in their direction as a way of saying thank you.

The Damage Toxic Links Can Do

Link spam isn’t just unethical; it’s devastating. Here’s what happens when your site is hit:

Google Penalties: Spammy backlinks trigger Google’s algorithm to penalise your site, causing rankings to drop.
Loss of Credibility: Toxic links make your site appear untrustworthy to search engines. Not only this, but of you have a decent trust flow, you will also lose it as well, and the only way to retrieve it is to disavow bad links to your site.
Recovery Takes Time: Cleaning up a spam attack involves identifying and disavowing bad links, which can take months to show results. In our case, it slowed us down by about two to three months before we recovered our client’s rankings. Not only that, but because we disavowed their first batch of links, the site immediately began to climb the SERPS again.
Not long after, they launched again a second wave of spam links. First was 56 spam links and the second was 86.

The client’s rankings graphs tell the story clearly. When the spammy links were picked up by Google, rankings plummeted. After we disavowed the bad links and rebuilt their credibility, rankings slowly began to recover.

Goodbye Page One eBook by Peter Karpouzas PK SEO

🚀 Goodbye Page One — Surviving Google’s AI Mode Takeover

AI SEO eBook by Peter Karpouzas | PK SEO

Discover the proven roadmap to survive Google’s AI Mode era and reclaim your website’s visibility. Learn how to adapt to AI-driven search, structure your content for AI Overviews, and build unstoppable authority signals that make your brand the one Google trusts.

This eBook reveals step-by-step GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategies to future-proof your rankings and dominate AI search in 2025 and beyond. Perfect for business owners, marketers, and SEOs ready to evolve with Google’s most disruptive change yet.

👉 Get the eBook on Amazon

Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited

How PK SEO Fights Back

At PK SEO, we don’t just clean up messes—we fight back. When we discovered the link spam attack, here’s what we did:

Documented the Spam Links: We analysed the toxic backlinks and identified their sources. Yes, they weren’t too good at covering their tracks and we picked up a couple of footprints, So, we decided to teach these guys a lesson they soon will not forget. We used their own links farms against them.
Disavowed Harmful Links: Using Google’s Disavow Tool, we neutralised the impact of the spam links on our client’s site as well as ours and all our client’s sites.
I have never seen such an attempt by an SEO agency to intentionally go out of their way not to just hurt their previous client’s rankings, but our own site and that of our client sites as swell.
Built High-Quality Backlinks: To counteract the damage, we created strong, trustworthy links which threw off what was left if anything.
Exposed the Culprit: We traced the link farms back to their owner—the disgruntled former SEO agency.

This wasn’t just about recovery; it was about sending a clear message: unethical practices won’t go unanswered and will not be tolerated by our own agency.

What Can You Learn From This?

This is one area you should always keep an eye on. Keep your eyes peeled when you notice a sudden drop.

This case is a cautionary tale about the dangers of link spam. It’s not just about rankings; it’s about protecting your reputation and your business. Here’s what you can do:

Regularly Monitor Backlinks: Use tools like Google Search Console to keep an eye on your link profile. There are also other sources lik Ahrefs, SEMrush, Similarweb and more.
Disavow When Necessary: If you spot toxic links, act fast to disavow them. If you are not familiar with this practice, please contact us
Work With Ethical Experts: Partner with an SEO agency that uses white-hat tactics and knows how to recover from sabotage.

Final Thoughts: Standing Strong Against Dirty Tactics

SEO should be about building long-term success, not tearing others down.

We take the issue of intentional sabotage of client rankings by other SEO agencies very seriously. When we uncover such unethical actions, we don’t rely on chance or karma to address the situation—we take decisive action ourselves.

To those who engage in such practices, consider this a warning: ensure your actions leave no trace, or be prepared to face the consequences of our firm response.

At PK SEO, we believe in ethical practices, but we’re also ready to stand up to anyone who tries to sabotage our clients. Whether it’s fixing a bad SEO strategy or fighting back against link spam, we’ve got the tools and expertise to protect your business.

If you’re worried about your rankings or suspect link spam, don’t wait. Contact us, and let’s get your site back on track.