Re-Post: Unanswered - Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.

[digitalimpulse]

Sorry for reposting, but i must have accidentally marked this as answered.  I am still seeking advice/solutions.

I have a client who's site was hacked.  The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists.

We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected.  We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms).

There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned.  In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists.

Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!

[Er_Maqui]

You can wait, the decission is from google, but i agree with the last response. Make google knows they doesn't want to cache / see this page with robots or another method, and then, wait. There's no more options for somethink like that.

[evolvingSEO]

I would check to see if the fake pages are still indexed or cached. So search the old fake URLs in Google, or use the cache: operator. Perhaps something was done to prevent Google from knowing to completely deindex these pages, like maybe they are blocked in robots.txt - Also look at crawl stats in webmaster tools. Does Google crawl a good portion of the pages on a daily basis?

Some of this delay might be Google waiting to make sure they can trust the site won't be hacked again. They are sometimes cautious in these situations. How long was the site hacked etc before it was fixed?

As Lantec said, part of this is just pushing forward - and those future links, shares, mentions, usage stats etc should help get the site back up there.

The last thing I'll mention is perhaps there were prior issues with the site that fell below Google's radar - and now maybe the hacking brought the site to their attention, and now it's being looked at with more scrutiny. It doesn't have to be a manual penalty, it could be a algorithmic penalty etc.  So I would do a top to bottom examination of everything from this perspective.

[Lantec]

I think in this case just solder on! You can't really put a time scale on things like this. A friend of mine lost this rankings for massive keywords about 2 months ago due to a duplicated content issue from the development site and he is still not back in the top 50.

I would just keep building quality clean links and hammering my social media. Also push a craw to it through WMT.