An accounting firm's traffic didn't decline gradually, it fell off a cliff overnight. That kind of sudden, sitewide drop almost always points to one specific cause, and this case was no exception.
The Situation
Nearly every page on the site lost the majority of its rankings within a single day. No redesign, no content changes, nothing the client's team had done recently that seemed related. That pattern is the clearest signal in SEO that something more serious is going on.
What We Found
Search Console showed exactly what we suspected: a manual action for what Google classified as a link scheme, tied to a batch of paid guest post placements the firm's previous agency had built months earlier, all using suspiciously similar anchor text pointing back to the same handful of pages, a pattern we cover in our guide to how nofollow and dofollow links should be used correctly.
What We Did
We compiled a complete list of the flagged links using backlink data similar to what we walk through in our guide to auditing a backlink profile, contacted site owners requesting removal where possible, submitted a disavow file through Search Console for the links we couldn't get removed directly, and filed a reconsideration request documenting exactly what had been done and why it wouldn't happen again.
The Result
The manual action was lifted about five weeks after the reconsideration request was submitted, and rankings recovered to close to their prior levels within another month, though a few of the most heavily-targeted pages took slightly longer to fully rebuild trust.
The Takeaway
Manipulative link building might work temporarily, but it carries real, sometimes sitewide risk, and it's the client's site that pays the price, not the agency that built the links. Before hiring any outside help for link building, it's worth knowing how to evaluate a digital PR agency's SEO impact before problems like this happen.
Worried a past link building campaign might come back to bite you? Talk to Rafenthic about a backlink risk review.