a real seo detective case: a beverly hills dentist got most of their traffic from china—here’s how we traced it to old backlink spam and cleaned it up.
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By Enzo Sison — Founder of Prism
If you’re a local business and your website (opens in a new tab) traffic report looks like an international travel itinerary… something’s off.
In this video, I walk through a real “SEO (opens in a new tab) detective” case we hit with a client (a dental (opens in a new tab) practice (opens in a new tab) in Beverly Hills). Google Analytics showed most of their traffic over the last 28 days coming from China, with the U.S. coming second, plus meaningful traffic from places like Singapore, France, and the UK.
For a Beverly Hills dentist, that’s not “global expansion.” That’s a problem.
Below is the exact workflow we used to trace the root cause and what you should do if your website has the same kind of SEO baggage.
When you look at your analytics and see:
…it usually means one of a few things:
In our case, it was #3.
And it was ugly.
Here’s what we uncovered:
The classic strategy was:
Years later, those links are still out there.
And now they don’t help you. They hurt you.
You don’t need 10 tools and a $5,000 audit to find this stuff.
We used three:
Here’s the exact flow.
Start with the simplest check:
GA → Reports → User / Acquisition / Geo (depending on GA version)
Look at:
In our situation:
That’s your first clue: this traffic is not real demand.
Next question:
Where is this traffic actually coming from?
In GA, look at:
If you see traffic coming from random websites that have nothing to do with your business (food blogs, spam domains, weird directories), you’re probably dealing with backlink spam or referral spam.
This is where Semrush earned its keep.
In Semrush:
In the video example, we found:
That’s not “good SEO.” That’s a footprint.
This is the part most people skip, and it’s the part that actually explains the “why.”
We opened the referring page and did:
Command + F → search (opens in a new tab) for the anchor text
Example: “Dentist Los Angeles”
And there it was.
A comment from a “user account” named something like Dentist Los Angeles saying random nonsense (like “I didn’t know Indians eat pumpkin.”)
And here’s the tell:
That’s deliberate spam.
And if you scroll further, you see more accounts like:
That pattern is not accidental.
Here’s the blunt truth:
Your site is about dentistry, but your backlink profile says “food blogs, random comments, unrelated international sites.”
Google is way smarter than it was in 2010. This stuff does not look trustworthy.
People click the link expecting one thing, land on a dentist website, and immediately leave.
That inflates bounce rate, ruins conversion reporting, and makes it harder to interpret what’s working.
If your domain has been around a long time and a lot of vendors touched it, you can inherit old tactics you didn’t approve—and might not even know exist.
This is extremely common with older domains.
There are three levels of response, depending on how bad it is.
Before you start “fixing,” get clear on the facts:
You want receipts before you touch anything.
In Semrush, export your referring domains list and flag:
You’re not trying to clean every single thing overnight.
You’re trying to remove the obvious junk first.
There are two main options:
You can contact site owners and ask them to remove the links. This works occasionally, but it’s usually slow and inconsistent—especially with spammy sites.
You can create a disavow file and submit it to Google so Google ignores those links for ranking purposes.
Two important notes:
A disavow file typically looks like this:
domain:spammyexample.comdomain:anotherjunkdomain.net(Do not disavow random stuff blindly. If you disavow good links, you can hurt your own rankings.)
If you’re not confident, get a second opinion before you submit anything.
This whole situation is exactly like software engineering:
Sometimes it’s frustrating as hell.
Then you finally find the real cause and it’s so obvious in hindsight.
That’s the job.
If you answer “yes” to any of these, it’s time for an audit:
If you’re seeing weird traffic patterns and you want a clean answer (fast), this is the kind of detective work we do.
We’ll walk through:
If you want us to take a look, reach out through the Prism site.
Or start with our seo audit service to get a prioritized plan.
You don’t need fancy tools or magic SEO hacks.
You need:
Because half the time, the “mystery” is just an old vendor’s strategy still haunting your domain.
And now you know how to find it.