Site's disappearnce in web rankings
-
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au.
Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report.
A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords.
Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect.
Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
-
Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.
-
Thanks Travis.
You're ace!
-
Great to see that you got it cleaned up. Though I think blocking /images via robots.txt is going a little too far. But that's just me.
But you've pretty well taken care of some of the common issues that will give you problems from any script kiddy.
-
Not a problem. Exit through the gift shop.
I can give it another glance once you think it's cleaned up. Seriously though, make sure to check your MySQL file for any suspicious users. This may have been 'low and slow', as in the attacker may have got in much earlier.
-
Thank Travis. You're a star. Best Moz Q&A Moz response ever! I'll look to implement a site restore from a clean backup and then take it from there.
-
Not a problem. I'm just a sucker for constantly saying; "Scan.... enhance... scan... enhance..." Don't judge me.
-
Thank you Travis, for all of this help!
-
Alright. Good for my word like Colt 45. Here goes:
The site is definitely hacked. Viagra, Propecia, Cialis and Levitra pointing to other hacked sites in the footer. Pretty much every language in Western Europe was targeted. Nice, huh?
My scan yielded that the Advanced Custom Field plugin is outdated and vulnerable. ACF may not show up in your list of plugins. Some devs prefer to put ACF somewhere else and call it via functions.php. (All other plugins scanned appear to be up to date.) That will take a bit of detective work on your part. Also, they may have previously used a theme called Expose. It is vulnerable as well. If you aren't using it, get rid of it.
I would hazard a guess that they got in through the ACF plugin, however.
My scan, oddly enough, wouldn't render a list of users and administrators. It usually does. So I would double check and make sure everyone is there that needs to be there. They can hide themselves from the WordPress GUI, but I doubt they can hide themselves at the MySQL level. So be careful when checking that out. MySQL is unforgiving.
This is definitely going to be messy business. I hope you have backups, that are free from the XSS attack.
In the future, I like what this guy says about Wordpress Security. It will be your friend. But the cleanup will likely be difficult if you don't have any clean backups.
Further, since nothing exists in a vacuum, the site's link profile is less than enviable. Though I would start with the hack cleanup.
Hopefully this is helpful. I have a bleeding heart for small businesses.
PM me and and we can work out a way to send files your way. But I think everything should be apparent at this point.
-
The site has been hacked. Let me put some more stuff together, but you will notice; "This site may be hacked" on search results under the URL when you do a site: operator search. See here: https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:abetterdriveway.com.au.
You should have received a message via GWT informing you of this. It's kind of odd that you didn't.
All I know is that I'm not going there on my Windows machine. Let me check it out with my 'down and dirty' rig. I'll get you some specifics a little later in the day.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Is it possible to rank in google mexico when you don't have a local site?
Hello, someone is asking me why we don't rank in google mexico search engine. I mentioned we don't have a google mexico site, but have a USA site, so we may rank, but not as well as if we had the mexico site. IS there anyway to improve rankings or tips? THanks! Laura Robinson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson321 -
Weird rankings on my website, can't figure it out
Hey guys, One of my post popular pages for "Rust Hacks" use to be - http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ Now when searching Google for site:ilikecheats.com rust hacks This page shows as the highest ranking - http://forum.ilikecheats.com/forums/221-Rust-Hacks-Rust-Cheats-Public-Forum What's weird is it seems the entire front end (Wordpress site) isn't ranking well anymore on page #1 of Google and the forums are ranking better currently. I did have a huge penalty from backlinks last year but cleared it. I got Yoast to do a site review and I'm cleaning up everything now. I also cleared most of the bad links via the disavow tool. Another example is when I search for "warz hacks" the forums show up in 4th place but the main website isn't showing at all back to page 10. If I search site:ilikecheats.com warz hacks the links directly to the main site doesn't show until page #2. So is this still a penalty that is carried over or is something else going on? Can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance for looking. 😃 Any ideas what's going on and why the main pages no longer rank - http://www.ilikecheats.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Draden670 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Are This Site's Backlinks Hurting Us?
Google WMT reports more than 198,000 backlinks to our site (www.audiobooksonline.com) from http://dilandau.eu/? We have never been notified by Google of any penalty, malware notification... but continue to struggle to get our page 1 Google ranking back since Panda. Could these backlinks be hurting our Google ranking? Should I implement a disavow rule for http://dilandau.eu/?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What's the best practise for adding a blog to your site post panda? subdomain or subdirectory???
Should i use a subdomain or a subdirectory? i was going to use a subdirectory however i have been reading a lot of articles on the use of subdomains post panda and the advantages of using them instead of using subdirectories. Thanks Ari
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dublinbet0