The SEO emergency room behind 150+ website recoveries won the public vote and reached two jury finals
Updated November 2, 2026. This article first announced Back2Rank’s place on the shortlist. It now includes the results.
Back2Rank won Crossroads Community Choice 2026, the public-vote award at StartUp Bulgaria’s Crossroads Awards. The awards are part of Crossroads 2026, held October 29–30 at the Bulgarian Army Stadium in Sofia. Back2Rank was also one of four finalists for Global Breakthrough of the Year, which went to EnduroSat, and founder and CEO Borislav Donchev was a finalist for Founder of the Year.
What Community Choice means for Back2Rank
Community Choice is the Crossroads Awards prize decided by public vote. For a recovery agency, that carries extra weight, because most of Back2Rank’s work comes through people who already know it: partner agencies, developers, and people the team has met at events.
“Community Choice means people took the time to vote for us,” says Borislav Donchev, founder and CEO of Back2Rank. “Thank you to every client, partner, and colleague who did. Most of our work comes from recommendations, and this vote is the same thing, just in public.”
Why a recovery agency was in a breakthrough category
The Global Breakthrough nomination came down to where Back2Rank’s work goes. The agency started in Sofia as MAX Digital in 2022 and rebranded as Back2Rank in August 2026. Today, most of its clients are outside Bulgaria, in Europe, the United States, and Canada, and it works with partners on more than three continents. It has recovered 150+ websites and removed 70+ penalties. In the same category, the jury also shortlisted LAM’ON and Shelly Group.
Every one of those cases started after something had already gone wrong. Traffic fell for no obvious reason, a migration broke rankings, a hacked site filled Google with spam pages, or a manual action (a penalty applied by a Google reviewer) hit the domain. That’s why Back2Rank calls itself the SEO emergency room. Each engagement starts by finding the real cause, not by picking a package.
How Back2Rank’s work crosses borders
Much of Back2Rank’s international work comes through other agencies and developers. In its agency program, a partner hands over a case it can’t solve in-house. Back2Rank runs the investigation and the recovery, and the client stays 100% the partner’s client. Back2Rank doesn’t pitch, upsell, or contact that client without the partner’s approval.
“None of our international clients came to us through ads,” Donchev says. “They came through agencies, developers, and people we met at events. A partner in one country brings us a case, and that’s how the work ends up in Canada or Sweden.”
Borislav Donchev, finalist for Founder of the Year
Borislav Donchev founded MAX Digital in 2022 after working on large-scale SEO projects at Netpeak Bulgaria. Clutch has named the agency a TOP SEO company in Bulgaria in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and it won at the TechBehemoths Excellence Awards 2025. Donchev was also named to TOP 100 Executives 2025.
“Each of those 150+ recoveries started with a business owner who had already lost traffic, inquiries, or sales,” Donchev says. “An award is a nice signal. The part I care about is that those sites ranked again.”
What the award doesn’t change
Back2Rank works the same way it did before the vote. It doesn’t sell predefined packages or offer free audits, and it doesn’t guarantee rankings. Scope and price come only after the team has reviewed the actual situation. Clients talk directly to the expert handling their case, with no account managers in between. The full rules are in the Back2Rank FAQ.
“When the problem isn’t SEO, or the recovery would cost more than it’s worth, we say so before anyone pays for it,” Donchev says.
Working with Back2Rank after Crossroads
Agencies and developers with a recovery case they’d rather hand to a specialist can reach the team at back2rank.com or through the agency program. StartUp Bulgaria lists every finalist in every category on the Crossroads Awards finalists page.
