Recovering from a Negative SEO Attack: A Guide for Adult Websites

Your rankings fell, and your backlink report lists links you never built. Before you treat it as a negative SEO attack, work out which came first.

We helped Escorta, Italy’s largest Italian-language escort directory, win back most of the top-three rankings it lost in Italy. Our Escorta case study shows why the order matters. A core update in November 2024 cost it 73% of its top-three rankings in Italy. Then a flood of low-quality links arrived. Referring domains went from under 1,000 to over 2,600 in a single month.

The update came first and the links followed. Date your own drop and your own link spike before you decide what you are fixing.

Rule out the update and your own errors

Match the week your clicks fell against the dates on Google’s Search Status Dashboard. Then list anything you changed on the site yourself. Our guide to why rankings drop covers the five usual causes and how to tell them apart.

Next, open the Manual actions report in Search Console. A manual action for “Unnatural links to your site” changes the job. Google’s steps are to download your links, ask owners to remove them, and disavow the rest. Then select Request Review in the Manual actions report. Document the links you removed and explain any you could not remove. Disavowing everything without trying removal can lead Google to reject that request. Do not resubmit before Google decides.

An empty report means no manual action, so no review to request.

Tell an attack from noise

Most of the spam in a link report needs no action. Google says it “typically will ignore the links” from known spam sites. You may still remove or disavow them. Google’s link spam update announcement of 14 December 2022 said it aims to neutralise unnatural links at scale. It also said any credit those links passed is lost.

Sort new referring domains by first-seen date in your backlink tool. Look for a cluster first seen close together. The Escorta flood above is that pattern, and it is not how a healthy profile grows. A spike shows that links arrived. It does not show they moved your rankings.

Then read the anchor text. If it reads like sales copy, the links are advertising. If it carries your own commercial keywords, look closer.

Search Console will not show you every link. The Links report caps its tables at 1,000 rows. Google says the report shows “a sample of internal and external links”. Use a backlink tool for a fuller list.

Some of what you find does not target you. Some link vendors publish reviews of themselves that name real businesses as customers. Our service baiting article gives four checks that separate that from a targeted attack.

Decide whether to disavow

Google calls the disavow tool “an advanced feature” and says to use it with caution. It also says most sites will not need it. Google points it at two cases. One is a manual action for unnatural links. The other is a manual action you expect because of paid links or other link schemes. Either way, Google says to disavow only if you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links.

Investigate exact-match commercial anchors at scale, or a ranking drop that coincides with a link spike. Those signals alone do not meet Google’s disavow threshold. Use both conditions above when deciding whether to submit a file.

If you upload a file, Google sets these rules:

• Write each domain as `domain:example.com`. Google also accepts one URL per line.
• Save a plain .txt file of up to 100,000 lines and 2MB. A line starting with # is a comment.
• Each upload replaces the last list for that property. If you upload in stages, repeat every earlier line in each new file. If you hold both http and https properties, upload a list for each.
• A successful upload can take a few weeks to show. The disavowed links still appear in the Links report, so their presence is not a sign of failure.
• The tool does not support Domain properties.

Check which property type you hold before you plan the upload. A domain-level line covers the domain; a URL-level line names one page. Choose the scope that the evidence supports. Keep a dated copy of every version.

On Escorts and Babes, Australia’s largest adult directory, we built and submitted a disavow file. We refresh it quarterly, alongside monthly technical monitoring. We describe no attack or recovery for Escorts and Babes. The example shows only a refresh schedule.

Check the attacks that are not links

Some attacks never touch your backlink profile. Google’s spam policies say injected code can redirect visitors by referrer, user agent or device. A direct visit to a hacked site can still look fine.

What you are dealing with	First step	Read more
A hacked site	Start with the Security issues report. Ask a competent maintainer to inspect suspected infected pages safely. Fix the whole site before you request a review. Google says a review can take from a few days to a few weeks.	Website management plans
Your content copied elsewhere	Ask the site owner first. If that fails, file a copyright notice with the host or with Google. Google shares a copy of qualifying notices with the public Lumen database. Write yours as a document others will read.	Our DMCA page
A false copyright notice against you	Read it before you answer it. A notice that names no work and shows no proof of ownership is a warning sign. Save the notice and the list of targeted URLs.	False DMCA notices and how to counter them

For fake reviews, read our reputation guide.

What recovery looked like at Escorta

We did four things. The Escorta case study lists them:

• Acquiring genuine authority links to outweigh the spam.
• Rebuilding the location-page strategy city by city, Rome first.
• Growing the English-language side of the site for the international audience.
• Watching the backlink profile constantly, separating real links from hostile ones.

We chose durable authority. A quick spike of links would not have survived the next update.

The average position improved from 12.6 to 7.2. Top-three rankings in Italy climbed back to within 9% of the peak before the drop. That is not a full recovery. The recovery has been steady, and it has held.

We have not published dates for these figures, or for how long the recovery has held. Do not read a timeline into any of this.

A manual action review can take several days or weeks. Google says link-related requests may take longer.

Set a monthly check

Each month, check new referring domains and scan the anchors for commercial terms you did not build. Investigate unfamiliar patterns, and apply Google’s combined disavow conditions before changing a file.

Where we can help

Our Backlink Audit reviews every backlink to your site and hands you a ready-to-upload disavow file. The Market Dominance plan on the same page includes monitoring for suspicious links and false DMCA removals. If someone has hacked your site, do the steps above, then ask us about our management plans. Maintenance and Partner plan clients get malware removal and recovery at no extra cost.

Not sure whether your profile needs action? We have operated since 2013. Send us your profile and ask. If the honest answer is that you need nothing, we will say so.