How I Tanked My First Websites Ranking

Now this may not be the best story to tell as an "SEO expert" but I feel because of this story my services have grown into something 10x better than I could've ever imagined, and hopefully any business owners or SEO experts in here who read this can learn from my mistakes as that's what it's all about.

When I first started in SEO I created what is known as a lead generation website, and this site was for plumbers in my area and the idea was that I could rank this site before signing a client and then use it to sell leads or rent out the site on a monthly basis once it was up and ranking. Everything was going smooth at first as the site looked good, the internal SEO was great, and even the initial rankings were doing well. But then I decided to do something I never recommend and that's cutting a corner to hire one of those overseas SEO companies. They had inboxed me a list of high quality sites I reviewed and guaranteed me there were thousands more just like them at a decent price so I decided to give them a shot. For the first 2-3 months my ranking did see an increase but from 4 months on that's where their real strategy appeared. I noticed my site had plummeted atleast 40-50 spots within two weeks and after reviewing my backlink profile I had noticed why. It turns out they had disconnected all the high powered links and dumped on a bunch or spammy/harmful sites to my website. It killed my ranking and almost even got me a Google penalty while being a nightmare to fix. I disavowed links for over 3 days sorting and removing the bad ones.

It was a tough lesson to learn for the younger "SEO expert" I was, but I think this is a lesson alot of us will have to learn the hard way. Since then I have made a lot of changes to my process haha and I will never cut corners. I've been able to successfully rank my clients in a variety of different industries from roofing all the way to CBD stores and the takeaway from all of it is that there are no shortcuts to SEO and quality will always beat quantity especially when it comes to link building.