Case study · SEO·Property
He was paying every month to damage his own site, and nobody told him.
The site had 841,000 backlinks. A number anyone would call excellent. But when we looked at where they came from, all of them traced back to just 36 domains. This is the story of the moment we found that, and why it was the thing keeping the site invisible.
200K
organic visits a month
up from 39
What we found
The number that looked like the best thing in the account
The first thing anyone looks at in a link report is the backlink count. Here it was 841,000, a figure you would expect from an international site. The problem is that this is not the number that matters. The number that matters is how many different places they came from, and that was 36.
The signal
841,000 links ÷ 36 domains
That means each referring domain was handing the site about 23,000 links on average. There is no natural way that shape occurs.
Why this happens at all
Somebody almost certainly sold him a backlink package. Sites selling those put the link on every page they have, in the footer or the sidebar, so a site with 20,000 pages hands over 20,000 links from a single domain. The counter shows an enormous number and the value is nil.
Why it is not merely useless, it is harmful
Google measures the diversity of the sources, not the count. A profile like this reads as manufactured, and the site is treated with suspicion rather than earning trust. The client was paying for something working against him.
And why nobody noticed
Because the monthly report said backlinks were up. Which was literally true. The difference is that somebody has to divide the two numbers and ask the second question.
The work
What we did, and what we refused to do
The work here was not to add links. It was to clean first, and cleaning is the part that makes the numbers fall before they rise.
What we did
- A full inventory of referring domains, sorted into useful, neutral, and harmful
- Disavowed the harmful domains and tracked Google's response month by month
- Built 1,230 real referring domains in place of the 36, from sources with actual audiences
- Grew keyword coverage from 681 to 69,700 through content built on search intent
- Fixed the technical foundation so the new pages could be indexed at all
What we refused
- We did not buy links, even when asked, because that is the same problem in a new wrapper
- We did not publish bulk content to inflate the page count
- We did not promise a date for the result, because Google's response to a cleanup is not ours to control
- We did not frighten the client with the word penalty. There was no manual action; the profile was simply weak
The dashboards, before and after
These come straight from Ahrefs. The site name and domain are withheld by agreement with the client, and everything else is untouched.
- Monthly organic visits
- 39200,000
- Ranking keywords
- 68169,700
- Referring domains
- 361,230
- Domain Rating
- 3466
39 organic visits a month · 681 keywords · 36 referring domains · DR 34
200k organic visits a month · 69.7k keywords · 1,230 referring domains · DR 66
Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer
Try it on your own site
How to check this is not happening to you right now
These three steps take five minutes and you can run them yourself without calling anyone. If the result worries you, the tools are the same ones we use.
01
Divide backlinks by domains
Open any link tool and find two numbers: Backlinks and Referring Domains. Divide the first by the second. Under 100 is usually normal. In the thousands, go and look at the sources.
02
Look at the top ten domains
Sort referring domains by link count descending. If the top domain is handing you thousands of links, open it. If it is unrelated to your field, or its pages are stuffed with links to other people, that is what we are describing.
03
Ask whoever works on your site one question
How many different domains did this month's links come from? If the answer is a large number of links and a small number of domains, you are in the same place.
None of this is a secret or a trick. We publish it because the people who would rather not tell you are the people not doing it.
Things that have to be said
- This took time. A cleanup does not pay off immediately, and Google takes months to re-evaluate a link profile.
- These figures are one site in one sector. Other sites with the same problem may take longer or less, depending on how much damage there is.
- Not every weak site is weak because of links. That was the diagnosis here. In other cases the problem is the technical foundation or the content, and the work starts somewhere else entirely.
- The name is withheld by agreement with the client, and we open the account in front of you in the meeting if you want to check.
Who this resembles
If you find yourself in the first column, this story is about you.
- Your site has had SEO work for a while and the result is not showing
- Your monthly reports show numbers rising while visits stay flat
- Somebody has ever sold you a backlink package
- Your site is established and running but nobody finds it
- Your site is new and has no link history at all
- Your problem is that the site is not being indexed, which is technical work that comes first
- You want a result within a month, which does not happen in cases like this
Next step
Want us to look at your link profile?
Send us the domain and we will look at the link profile and the technical foundation, and tell you if anything like this is there. If it is not, we will tell you that too.
Your details come to us alone. We do not sell them and we do not add you to a mailing list.
