Website was hacked and is clean now. What to do next for Google?
-
Hai All,
Website was hacked and is clean now. What to do next?
- Send a Reconsideration Request to Google through Google search console. How detailed should this request be? As detailed as possible? And how much time will it usually take before Google responds?
- Should I remove all infected URL’s that Google has indexed by using Google search console, remove URL’s? Or is this not necessary?
(All the infected URL’s will give a 404 statuscode now)
Regards, Maurice
-
Hi Travis and Chris,
Thanks a lot for your helpfull answers!
We got a manual action by Google because of all the infected URL's.
The website is clean now and 2 professionals are monitoring the website continiously. So I am confident it will stay clean.
I have all the information now for the reconsidiration request.
Thanks again!
Regards, Maurice
-
TL;DR Follow Google's Guide on Recovering a Hacked Site
Orrrrr.... deze.
First, are you 100% sure it's clean? Some people get lucky, and have a clean backup. Others aren't so lucky.
Some hacks come in 'low and slow'. In other words, the site could have been compromised well before any outward signs became apparent. So definitely consult a security professional, if you haven't already done so. (Sometimes your host will 'clean' it for you, but miss critical points, and you're back in the same spot later.)
I suppose it couldn't hurt to remove URLs created by the hack. But if they're all gone, resolving as 404 ,they will drop out of the index in a couple weeks or sooner. The main thing is that the site is clean.
If you're sure it's clean, submit the site for review. The guides I've linked mention that it will take several weeks. And once Google has determined the site is clean, you should see any of the 'hacked' and/or 'malware' snippets disappear within a few days.
And I seriously recommend having a security professional review the site and hosting. A security professional will not only help you determine the cause of the problem, but also with mitigation of future risks. Best of luck.
-
Hi Maurice,
To answer this one accurately, we'll need a little more info on what happened. What was changed on your site as a result of the hacking? Were you hit with a manual penalty or is it just algorithmic? What have you done about fixing it so far?
With that info I can be a little more helpful
For some broader advice though, do everything you can to restore your site to its original state and if it has been a manual penalty, definitely provide a detailed account of what happened and what you're doing to fix it via Search Console. If it's just algorithmic, fixing your site and continuing to improve it is going to be your best way to fix it.
Regarding the pages that have been taken down, just make sure Screaming Frog or a similar tool isn't picking up any 404s from them - if it sees no 404s it means there are no remaining internal links to those pages. That being the case, the only 404s will be from external sites which aren't your responsibility. Once this is done, Google will realise fairly quickly (hours to a couple of weeks) that they're actually gone and de-index them.
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
-
Google Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
Hi there, I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page) After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later. I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate. There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as: Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links, There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound. Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover? Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbutler9120 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Google Seeing 301 as 404
Hi all, We recently migrated a few small sites into one larger site and generally we had no problems. We read a lot of blogs before hand, 301'd the old links etc and we've been keeping an eye on any 404s. What we have found is that Webmaster is picking up quite a few 404s, yet when we investigate these 404s they are 301'd and work fine. This isn't for every url, but Google is finding more and I just want to catch any problems before they get out of hand. Is there any reason why Google would count a 301 as a 404? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Google + under Google business domain email account
Hello there, I have a quick and straight question and I am hoping to find answer here. What do we do with a G+ profile that was set up through a business domain's email account that is used by more than one person? We want to use the company name, but we can't as it is considered personal email account although it is under business domain verified by Google. Is there a way that we ask Google to change it and allow us to use the name of the company or should we just deactivate it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | montauto0 -
Dropped Out of Google and Bing
I am helping with a site that at one time I had on page 1 for Google/Bing. Site started to slip in rankings, then someone else did a makeover of the store and botched things by renaming pages, having errors in pages (multiple head/body), mismatch page names from sitemap, etc. Site slipped to page 4/5. I righted things, fixed duplication using canonicalization, made some other changes. Now site is gone completely from Google/Bing for desired keyword. No penalties. Site still shows if do search on domain name. Site is www.plussizeplum.com (plus size lingerie, sorry), keyword target is plus size lingerie. Anyone have any clues, tips, etc on why we fell off the face of the earth? Page Authority/Domain Authority are both comparable to most of the page 1/2 sites for same thing. Thanks for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlcohen0 -
Google Reviews
I have a couple of reviews from clients on Google that seem to have just disappeared. What gives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0