Website Hacked now it's not Ranking
-
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.
-
I'm going to try this as the current option is sitting. Thanks for the response!
-
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.
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
-
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website?
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website? If anyone know can tell me, such gigs are selling on the Fiverr.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jefjaa0 -
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Anyone backlinks from hacked FaceBook widgets?
I was going through my backlink profile the other day and started noticing a huge number of new back links, like 100k. Digging through them, I am seeing a lot of links that are inserted in Facebook feed widgets. You will see the link at the bottom of the widget. From what I can see, a lot of these links are all in this format, all on European domains, all running WordPress. Doesn't seem to have anything do to spamminess. Had domains that were on blacklists, some not. Anyone seen anything like this before? The only thing I can think of was maybe an automated hack bot that inserted the link when it was able to get in? E0OMJfi.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
Help identifying cause for total rank loss
Hello, Last week I noticed one of my pages decreased in rank for a particular query from #8 to #13. Although I had recently made a few minor edits to the page (added an introductory paragraph and left-column promo to increase word count), I thought the reason for the decrease was due to a few newly ranked pages that I hadn't seen before. In an attempt to regain my original position, I tried to optimize the meta title for the singular form of the word. After making this change, I fetched and rendered the page as Google (status = partial) and submitted the page for indexing (URL only, not including on-page links). Almost immediately after submitting, the page dropped from #13 out of the top 50. I've since changed the meta title back to what it was originally and let Google crawl and index the page on its own, but the page is still not in the top 50. Could the addition of the page description and left column promos tipped the scales of keyword stuffing? If I change everything back to the way it was originally, is it reasonable to think I should regain my original position below the new pages? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?
I recently noticed a jump in my Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Upon further investigation I found hundreds of the most spammy web pages I've ever seen pointing to my domain (although all going to 404 errors): http://blurchelsanog1980.blog.com/ http://lenitsky.wordpress.com/ These are all created within the last week. A. What the hell is going on? B. Should I be very concerned? (because they are 404 errors) C. What should my next steps be? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Determining if our ranking is due to increased competition
Hello, I'd like to give you a list of DA/PA and see if the slipping of our rank is due to competition. This if for our main keyword. Below is the top ten sites in our industry - their DA and PA for this head term. This is for the plural form of the keyword - a product term. If I don't say differently the following are where the title has the keyword in it exactly and also these are ecommerce site listings. Does this look like we are being outdone by competition or would you say that there might be some other cause: 1. DA 85, PA 38 2. DA 34 PA 34 (These guys are mostly paid links by the way) 3. DA 100 PA 55 (singular form of keyword and also informational site) 4. DA 91 PA 41 5. DA 23 PA 24 (The only thing I see about this one is that their backlink profile is very white hat and they have the nicest looking site in our niche) 6. DA 29 PA 31 (exact match domain) 7. DA 99 PA 1 8. DA 22 PA 34 (Guide including infographics - doesn't sell products themselves) 9. DA 96 PA 1 10 DA 26 PA 38 -- This is us with 57 total root domains sitewide and 43 root domains to the home page. Let me know what additional information you need.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
How Fast Can You Rank a New Domain?
How long would it take to get a 1 page ranking for a new site after Penguin? Thinking about starting fresh. New site would have fresh content and keyword in the domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | veed230