Number of indexed pages dropped. No manual action though?

[connectiveWeb]

I have a client who had their WordPress site hacked. At that point there was no message from Google in webmaster tools and the search results for their pages still looked normal. They paid sitelock to fix the site.  This was all about a month ago.

Logging into Webmaster Tools now there are still no messages from Google nor anything on the manual actions page. Their organic traffic is essentially gone. Looking at the submitted sitemap only 3 of their 121 submitted pages are indexed. Before this all of them where in the index. Looking at the index status report I can see that the number of indexed pages dropped completely off the map.

We are sure that the site is free of malware. This client has done no fishy SEO practices. What can be done?

[Toddfoster]

Hello Rodney,

From what you can see, have there been any significant changes in your website's rankings to go along with the traffic drop? I have a client who had some web development work done by their team and they accidentally deleted the GA tracking code, leading to an enormous drop in registered traffic but no difference in rankings.

If your rankings are still intact, try seeking out the UA on your homepage to ensure it hasn't been tampered with. If it is still there and GA is accurately tracking your data, then you probably have a lingering hack that was sprung after the cleanup occurred. These things can come back to bite you if a code audit isn't performed by a security tech to ensure the site is properly cleaned.

The loss of indexed pages sounds like there might be an issue in your robots.txt file or with your sitemap.

The last part of this might be an automated Panda penalty, but this is probably the least likely option.

During the hack, was there any nefarious link-building conducted that you're aware of? What you're experiencing might be the lingering effects of an automated Penguin penalty (there can be several months of sluggish rankings following one of these).

Let me know about the above and I will see what else I can do to help!

Thanks and best of luck,

Rob

[RobertFisher]

Thanks to Umar for asking for the domain.

I looked using a site: operator and found 13 pages and 21 pdf's that were indexed. I am not familiar with the company who handled the cleanup so I would check to make sure they have not added any robots.txt, etc. in an attempt to keep it all safe. That would be my first look. To me this is the most logical if you have submitted a new sitemap.

Let us know how it comes out,

Robert

[connectiveWeb]

More info:

The website: http://www.bouldertherapeutics.com/

Website hacked: End of June

Website cleaned and verified by sitelock within days

Number of indexed pages pages drop from in the 100's to just a few

Organic search visits dropped from 1600 in June to just over 400 in July

No messages in webmaster tools. No website changes. No link building done.

[UmarKhan]

This sounds really scary! I have to look at the URL before making any final comment on this.

IMO, there could be several reasons for this. You have to explore this from every way. Are you sure, the site is completely recover? I have some reservations on that.