[Test...Sort of] Link Velocity or Link Drop

JudderMan

Recently, I have been offering potential new clients a few weeks free, in order to claim them as a client after showing/proving that my SEO/link-building works. It's risky, yes, but we have the ability to delete links using SER so it's a little wasted time but not so much if website owners are even 1% savvy (which most of them aren't...).

As a favour to someone I offered 6 weeks of free SEO to an e-commerce site. Found some good keywords for their products, ran SER (only) for 6 weeks and they saw £800 in revenue (I don't know what that equates to in profit), from week 4-6. It was a brand new site, so that ranking time-frame makes sense to me. However, it's been 3-4 weeks since I stopped SER, and now the sales are 0 and the rankings have dropped. There Ahrefs profile has seen a drop but the quality of the links weren't great in Ahrefs score that did drop off (but they were .edu).

Now the person wants to pay me for SEO but I can't figure out if I start up again whether the link velocity will look odd to Google or it's just because of the link drop in their profile? Anyone had experience? I usually get clients and keep them so I haven't really seen this before. If a client goes, then they don't normally come back.

coneh34d

JudderMan The Google black box is your nemesis here. To be safe I would start the project as if they were a new client. 

You say yourself that you don't know whether it is safe. Trust your gut. Unless you know the backlink profile can handle the velocity levels you would be at had you not stopped.

I have worked with sites that Google has hit, and there is nothing worse. It is not worth the risk you may want to take to get them moving in the SERPs as quickly as possible.

JudderMan

I'll be creating new T1s, don't worry Since stopping and not hearing from them, I have started promoting the same niche myself as an affiliate not a distributer, as the competition is fairly low...