More than 450 Pages Created by a hacker
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am in charge of the Spanish SEO for an international company, related to security. A couple of months ago, I realized that my Spanish/keywords/post all vanished from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duckduckgo.
Then I noticed that somebody in command of the main website used a disavow all!
I was in shock, as all of you can imagine. Knowing that all the inbound links were spam score under 4, highly relevant and so.
Later on, I was informed that the website was hacked and somebody took that action. Of course, it did not solved the issue.
I continue researching and found those pages - "Online%20Games%20-%20Should%20Parents%20Worry%20Or%20Celebrate%3F" - all of them like this one.
I informed the owner of the website - he is not my client - my client is the Spanish Manager. They erased the pages, of course plus sent all those, to avoid the 404 responses, to the homepage with a 301.
My heart stopped at that point!
I asked them to send all those with a redirect 301 to a new hidden page with nofollow and noindex directives.
We recover, my keywords/pages are in the first page again. Although the DA fell 7 points and no inbound links for now. I asked for the disavow file "to rewrite it", not received yet.
Any better ideas? Encountered a similar issue? How did you solved it?
Thanks in advance. -
Hi Andy,
Thank you very much for sharing your experience with the issue.
I will do as you said, asking for a standard related to communication. Sadly, as far as I know, at the other side of the line there is plenty of developers, although without no comprehension of SEO.
Despite that, it is a pleasure to work for a very technical niche and my client is fully supportive. Also, it helps to develop a quick thinking regarding SEO technical issues; which is not my field of expertise.
I shall share your advice about the Wordfence plugin premium.
Thanks again. All the best,Mª Verónica B.
-
Hi
Firstly it seems like you did all the right steps to resolve the issue. A while back I had a similar issue with my site and later a client's site that got hacked. They were both WordPress sites so now always recommend Wordfence plugin (premium) to stop the hack in the first place.
I wouldn't worry too much about the drop in DA, DA goes up and down all the time - it's only relative to your competitors. If your competitors go up and you go down that's when I would worry.
You are right in wanting the disavow file - its needs an audit and updating. I would just keep chasing and explaining you are potentially losing revenue and profit (they probably don't get the impact of rankings, but if you explain it in something which they do they will respond quicker). Once you have the file it's up to you to audit and amend as necessary, but this won't affect your Moz DA.
I would also ask them what processes they have put in place to stop getting hacked again if your doing all this work and the client hasn't changed how they operate, it could be a lot of time spent for nothing.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Hacked Websites (Doorways) Ranking First Page of Google
Hello Moz community! I could really use your help with some suggestions here with some recent changes I've noticed in the Google serps for terms I've been currently working on. Currently one of the projects I am working on is for an online pharmacy and noticed that the SERPs are being now taken up by hacked websites which look like doorways to 301 redirect to an online pharmacy the hacker wants the traffic to go to. Seems like they may be wordpress sites that are hacked and have unrelated content on their websites compared to online pharmacies. We've submitted these issues as spam to Google and within chrome as well but haven't heard back. When searching terms like "Canadian Pharmacy Viagra" and other similar terms we see this issue. Any other recommendations on how we can fix this issue? Thanks for your time and attached is a screenshot of the results we are seeing for one of our searches. 1Orus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | monarkg0 -
Google suddenly stops ranking a page for a "keyword" with same "keyword" in title tag. Low competition.
Hi all, We have released our next version of product called like "software 11", which have thousands of searches every month. So we have just added this same keyword "software 11" as page title suffix to one of the top ranking pages. Obviously this is the page has been added suddenly with "software 11" at page title, multiple header tags and 1 mention in paragraph. Google ranked it for 2 days and suddenly stopped showing this page in entire results for the same keyword we optimised the page for. Why does it happened? Does Google think that we are overdoing with this page and ignoring it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Doorway v Landing Pages - Whats the difference?
I suppose I have not much further information to add apart from ask apart from what is the difference? Both are highly optimized pages but that's where my knowledge ends!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loudawg0 -
SEO for Career sites and sup-pages
For main job categories: We manage several career pages for several clients but the competition for the main keywords (even several long tail) is from big names like Indeed and similar job boards?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rflores
What would you recommend? For job posts: Since the job posts that our clients post are short lived (80% live less than a month) would it still be incorrect to purchase backlinks? or is it always a big no Thanks for your help. And if a similar question has been asked I would appreciate if you could point me to it. I could not find one.0 -
Best Location to find High Page Authority/ Domain Authority Expired Domains?
Hi, I've been looking online for the best locations to purchase expired domains with existing Page Authority/ Domain Authority attached to them. So far I've found: http://www.expireddomains.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VelasquezEF
http://www.domainauthoritylinks.com
http://moonsy.com/expired_domains/ These site's are great but I'm wondering if I'm potentially missing other locations? Any other recommendations? Thanks.1 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0