Revenge SEO: How a fired contractor erased 90% of our traffic | Daily Reports Online
Last year, I brought on a new specialist in search engine optimization (SEO) to drive backlinks and business, only to find the contractor used black-hat practices to generate toxic, irrelevant results. Worse, the content was AI-written and keyword-stuffed.
Co-Founder of Vitality CBD.
I fired him three months later but made the big mistake of not immediately revoking access. Out of revenge, he deindexed 200 product pages and blog posts, causing a 90% drop in traffic and devastating sales.
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that marketing is both a growth engine and an attack surface. This is a cautionary tale about handing over the keys to your business backend and what it takes to rebuild from the brink.
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From onboarding to sabotage
In hindsight, there were several red flags. This marketing “professional” talked a big game but relied on outdated techniques that didn’t translate well in the online world. We’re in hemp wellness e-commerce so digital marketing is essential. However, keyword stuffing, AI slop content, and low-quality backlinking can quickly ruin search engine rankings.
It was quickly evident this wasn’t a marketing fit. The contractor scored external media mentions for products we didn’t sell (lying that it would bring more traffic) and focused heavily on blog volume (promising that posting several times a day would break through, when in reality it was off-brand and off-voice). Other times, he bought backlinks in bulk to fake traction, showing us legitimate-looking domains that ultimately did nothing.
I’d seen enough. He was fired in October but, foolishly, retained access. This was my mistake and I paid for it – the contractor retaliated and manually deindexed nearly all of our pages, one by one, thereby telling Google that they no longer exist and not to return them. The fallout was immediate with a 90% traffic drop, 50% sales drop, and the erasure of multiple years of branding and marketing progress.
A site-wide audit and rehabilitation
Untangling the mess was a job in and of itself. Beyond reindexing the website, we didn’t know what else had changed, so we needed to audit everything. Here we found something strange in the backend: a security plugin quietly emailing daily activity to an unknown contact. We still don’t know the what or the why of this tool, but it only further cemented that we’d lost control.
First, we needed to lock the doors, revoke stale logins, and restrict access to those who needed it. Then the fake wins and bad results had to go. After all, backlinks mean nothing if they ignore site health and audience relevance. We disavowed each toxic reference and began repairing the damage to the company’s voice and positioning one link at a time.
We scrubbed poorly written copy, errant mentions of non-existent products, and even image alt text stuffed with keywords. We also removed the incoherent, AI-written blog archive in its entirety. From top to bottom, we needed to rebuild our experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT) in both the eyes of search engines and customers.
It took the better part of four months to realign our external and internal communications, and complete the manual, page-by-page reindex. Today, our traffic is back up, though it hasn’t fully returned to its peak. Frustratingly, SEO sabotage is fast but the recovery is slow.
Protect your marketing, protect your business
As a result of this nightmare, I’ve learned several marketing lessons the hard way.
Never overlook access. Onboard with least privilege from day one, offboard as soon as someone’s off the project. Be selective about admin roles and don’t blindly trust newcomers (no matter how well they sell themselves). Likewise, go the extra mile with security whenever someone departs on bad terms.
Review anything they could touch for injected scripts, rogue plugins, or unfamiliar integrations. Malicious code can sit dormant or masquerade as legitimate for months, so the cost of a review is worth it in the long run.
Second, particularly for companies in a trust-sensitive or regulated sector, shortcuts cost twice as much. Backlinks count for naught if they’re irrelevant or inaccurate, and they actually work against you if your company falls into Your Money or Your Life (YMYL). Google more heavily scrutinizes this segment and SEO snake oil salesmen threaten to undermine your positioning faster than they can build it.
Third, embed checks and balances from the get-go. Even before the sabotage, we lost marketing momentum because no one was closely overseeing the contractor. Insource enough knowledge to audit your vendors and demand method transparency from the jump. Anyone selling overnight spikes warrants stricter inspection and guardrails.
This was a wake-up call. Until now, I didn’t truly appreciate how SEO in the wrong hands can be a single point of failure that takes revenue with it. For B2B and B2C companies, search presence is business-critical. I encourage leaders and admins to protect it like the infrastructure it is. No one person with ill intent should be able to dictate your digital success or failure.
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