Hi, and thank you for such a wonderful forum for thought. To think that my stupid a$$ has been messing with this stuff for this long and not had this resource. Good grief.

I have been the victim of negative seo. I fell behind on my site monitoring because, well, I was busy working. Then one day I looked up and realized the phone hadn't rang in a week.

This is humbling. I'm an IT provider by day, hopeful SEO that can escape the IT world by night. Anyway, I've had the Pro package from Cloudflare for at least 3 years. But I was lazy and didn't whitelist the crawlers, I just turned the firewall of for a minute. Needless to say, at some point I didn't turn it back on.

I looked at Search Console and was getting pinged or...? to the point that I was totally out of all Local Packs. Nowhere to be found. Never got one alert from Google, warning, email, violation- nothing.

I have obviously fixed the firewall, whitelisted all my SEO tools, but now that I'm back at my website all the time, I'm realizing I must be getting link spammed. Is there any way these are just finding me? The ones I disavowed yesterday were all about gambling and casinos, the link anchors are usually keywords that type of thing. I have a list of links, but last time I tried to post links they spammed my post right out of the gate.

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Duh.

Thank you for any and all help. This really has to be a corroborative effort.