Unable to Get Back to Performance Levels Six Months After Attack
-
We work on a fine art site. In May we were attacked and blocked by Google for about 12hrs until we cleared all affected pages and files. Our response was pretty fast, and to be fair, so was Google's action to unblock us.
However, shortly afterwards, the entire site's page rank disappeared, it never came back. I also believe people are now speculating that Google's PR updates are either overdue or have stopped, so I can't gauge PR at all.
One way we can gauge potential for position is that we remain top 1-6 in Bing for most terms. Moz authority reflects this as well. An example:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?rls=en&q=doug+hyde+prints
These are the types of position we occupied on Google prior to the drop. We've been told there are no manual actions against us, nevertheless we've worked to clean out any duplicate content and disavow some link trawling/people directory sites that duplicated a lot of our content. Page code has been cleaned up, pages optimised, loading times reduced where possible etc. etc..
This chap seems to have had similar issues back in 2011: http://moz.com/community/q/not-ranking-well-after-site-was-hacked
Any input/experience gratefully received. Working our wotsits off to generate traffic off no PR and Adwords at the moment and it's a struggle. I've actually got new sites to rank faster and better than this in 3 months, so this is one big penalty.
Roland
-
A few points.
1. Make absolute sure your site is clear of Malware. Check Google Webmaster Tools and I also recommend running your URL through the Securi checker (the scan is free, and the service is worth it if you were hit)
2. After a malware hit, Google recommends you use the "Crawl as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools and then select "Submit this page and all linked pages to Index" option.
3. Make sure your sitemaps are up to date and properly submitted via Google Webmaster Tools.
4. I did notice in your question that you disavowed links. If you disavowed links that were actually helping you this could have had a negative effect on your rankings. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to get these back.
It's possible your drop has nothing to do with the Malware - it could be just an unfortunate coincidence. Do a site audit, check your crawl errors, try to match your traffic drop against known Google updates, and stay vigilant about improving your content and outreach.
No definite answers here, but I hope this background helps. Best of luck with your site!
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Just Launched New Site - First Steps to Get it to Rank?
Good Morning Mozzers... We just recently launched a brand new site and now the fun part begins: trying to get it to appear in the SERPS. I'm wondering if you guys can share your best and most proven secrets/tricks to get brand new sites to rank in Google.... For example, what are the first directories you add the site to? What are some links you try and aquire first? Looking for some tips and ideas for a brand new site. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
How to get only the most needed css for faster loading?
I have been using the Firefox duster app to clean up my css so only the page rendering css is loaded when my page is loaded. But it doesn't seem to be working now. Does anyone know of another tool that will do this for me?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Modx revolution- getting around index.php vs. root duplicate content issue?
Basically, SEOMoz bots are flagging our index.php and root files as duplicate content of one another, therefore cutting the page authority of each. What we want to do is make the root the canonical preference over index.php. Ordinarily, we should be able to do this in the htaccess file. For some reason, as the site has been built into a cms using ModX Revolution, this does not seem to work. We've tried A TON of htaccess rewrite mods to resolve this issue to no avail. We have also tried revising our sitemap to include only the root address. Any ideas? We'll try most anything at this point. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | G2W0 -
Keep getting random broken links pointed at our website
Over the past 6 months I've noticed an increase of 404 errors being picked up by Google Webmaster Tools. When I look at the errors table and review these errors the links are invariable made up likes being generated from what looks like scraper sites or sites with search results embedded into them. Below are some examples of them. Broken Link URL Generating the Link www.mysite.com/rwickenhauser http://www.webstatsdomain.com
Technical SEO | | adamlcasey
www.mysite.com/guest http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/windows http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/..app http://213.174.143.40/
www.mysite.com/ht.. http://de.aguea.com/ None of these pages exist on our website.
So do I need to setup redirects for these or can they be ignored?0 -
2 months on and still no Google plus pic :-(
Buonjourno from 10 degrees C wet Wetherby UK 🙂 2 months ago i set up my Google+ account so i could get a thumb nail pic like this:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/working-example-thumb-pic.jpg But instead i get a pictureless snippet like this:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/no-google-plus-image-snippet.jpg I feel ive waited long enopugh for it to be working by now & today i went back to the drawing board to see why does Kate Mallender have a pic & I dont. But having looked at my set up: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/authorship-tested-but-no-imagecopy-2.jpg I cant see any difference. I admit Ive ran out of ideas, But if any SEO mozzer can point me in the right direction I'd be eternally gratefull 🙂 Grazie Tanto,
David0 -
Get to the top of Google in 30 days?
I see on sites like scriptlance where webmasters post a project for SEO services and bidders offering their services to get you to the top of Google in 30 days. Is that out of the question or is it reasonable because they use a service like SEOMoz?
Technical SEO | | webtarget0