Website Hacked now it's not Ranking
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One of my domains was hacked right before I took over managing it. The hacker created around 100 links for simply grotesque things. After I took over I erased the entire site, rebuilt from scratch, new server (inmotion), rewrote every page, robots.txt every offending page, and even 301 just in case 404s were hurting me. I am now almost a month in and I have seen zero movement on anything rankings based.
This is not a bad domain it was registered in 2008 and has a few decent citations because of the Doc's medical license. They registered for BBB in November and have a 30 year old listing citation from them based on business establishment.
I must be going crazy but it's not ranking for anything except the homepage.
I didn't know Google could hold a grudge for so long. The only ranking I can sometimes achieve is through Google Places which still has to compete with tough domains.
I've already put in a reconsideration request and received a response stating the following: We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Just check it for yourself I know it's a work in progress but I'm not even considered relevant on page 50! And the crap links are still indexed!! A search for a keyword I'm aiming for with my client's name followed after gives me no results.
I am currently using wordpress, yoast xml, and single keyword focusses. My market is tough but no way I can not rank for the keyword and my name.
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I'm going to try this as the current option is sitting. Thanks for the response!
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Hi Allen,
After taking a quick look at the site in question and investigating the pages that are still indexed, i'd recommend the following plan of action:
Change your robots txt to allow the crawling of the offending pages in question
Change the response code from 301 to 404
Use the remove URL tool within GWT for all of these offending pagesWait a few days, for all the pages to be purged from the cache and then if you're not seeing any results submit another reconsideration request. As it's most likely an algorithmic penalty there's not much they can do, but they may crawl the site again when it's clean.
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