19 SEO Horror Stories That Will Scare the Hell Out of You

Published on SearchEngineJournal October 31, 2018 (Alexandra Tachalova)

In this post, 19 SEO experts share about the most terrifying SEO horror stories that they had ever faced in their career.

Here is Jason Barnard’s story:

Jason Barnard, Founder, Kalicube®

Back in 2013, I was called in to have a manual penalty lifted. I spent a year disavowing thousands of spammy backlinks.

I also took the opportunity to clean up the site - deleting doorway pages, switching to SSL and HHTP2, reorganizing the categorization, optimizing the images, adding some funky Schema, and a few other nice tricks.

After three months, the penalty was lifted, and six months later we were seeing 10 percent+ traffic increases every month.

One day I noticed the Google +1 count had shot up from 20 to 1,020.

Turns out, the boss had become frustrated with the “slow” progress and bought them from what he called a “reputable” online service.

A few days later, manual penalty.

Back to square one.