Recovering ranking from a spam link injection to website.

[BlueManDude]

Hi, I have WP site for a local business that suffered a spam link injection attack sometime in the last few weeks...discovered this week. It appears that most of the links were injected as blog posts by an unauthorized user (SEO bad actor for a competitor?), and it appears that most of the links were posted in the last 2 weeks. Developer is scrubbing/restoring site...waiting on response from SEO people. I'm interested in opinions about possible damage done and best steps for a speedy, sustainable recovery of ranking. Site has a lot of content for a local business, has been live for years, and was ranking well. Thank you.

 

[ElizabethRule]

Did you notice a decline in rankings and traffic for specific pages after this spam link injection attack? I would look at this at a page level, to see what pages decreased in rankings/traffic because of this. Did any of your core pages that spam links were not added onto lose rankings and traffic, or just the blog pages that the links were added onto?

If you noticed rankings declined as a direct impact of these spam links, then I would think getting rid of them would improve rankings somewhat quickly once Google recrawls the pages. There has been a lot of SERP ranking volatility lately, so what could be a factor here too.

 

[JohnMarathonAir]

Hi, I have WP site for a local business that suffered a spam link injection attack sometime in the last few weeks...discovered this week. It appears that most of the links were injected as blog posts by an unauthorized user (SEO bad actor for a competitor?), and it appears that most of the links were posted in the last 2 weeks. Developer is scrubbing/restoring site...waiting on response from SEO people. I'm interested in opinions about possible damage done and best steps for a speedy, sustainable recovery of ranking. Site has a lot of content for a local business, has been live for years, and was ranking well. Thank you.

We have had a recent significant decline from years of number one for all relevant keywords to numbers 4-8 for the main keywords. I've been wondering whether there was some kind of major update. But would you please share how you discovered these links? Is there a tool that would reveal these?