Site's disappearnce in web rankings
-
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au.
Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report.
A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords.
Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect.
Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
-
Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.
-
Thanks Travis.
You're ace!
-
Great to see that you got it cleaned up. Though I think blocking /images via robots.txt is going a little too far. But that's just me.
But you've pretty well taken care of some of the common issues that will give you problems from any script kiddy.
-
Not a problem. Exit through the gift shop.
I can give it another glance once you think it's cleaned up. Seriously though, make sure to check your MySQL file for any suspicious users. This may have been 'low and slow', as in the attacker may have got in much earlier.
-
Thank Travis. You're a star. Best Moz Q&A Moz response ever! I'll look to implement a site restore from a clean backup and then take it from there.
-
Not a problem. I'm just a sucker for constantly saying; "Scan.... enhance... scan... enhance..." Don't judge me.
-
Thank you Travis, for all of this help!
-
Alright. Good for my word like Colt 45. Here goes:
The site is definitely hacked. Viagra, Propecia, Cialis and Levitra pointing to other hacked sites in the footer. Pretty much every language in Western Europe was targeted. Nice, huh?
My scan yielded that the Advanced Custom Field plugin is outdated and vulnerable. ACF may not show up in your list of plugins. Some devs prefer to put ACF somewhere else and call it via functions.php. (All other plugins scanned appear to be up to date.) That will take a bit of detective work on your part. Also, they may have previously used a theme called Expose. It is vulnerable as well. If you aren't using it, get rid of it.
I would hazard a guess that they got in through the ACF plugin, however.
My scan, oddly enough, wouldn't render a list of users and administrators. It usually does. So I would double check and make sure everyone is there that needs to be there. They can hide themselves from the WordPress GUI, but I doubt they can hide themselves at the MySQL level. So be careful when checking that out. MySQL is unforgiving.
This is definitely going to be messy business. I hope you have backups, that are free from the XSS attack.
In the future, I like what this guy says about Wordpress Security. It will be your friend. But the cleanup will likely be difficult if you don't have any clean backups.
Further, since nothing exists in a vacuum, the site's link profile is less than enviable. Though I would start with the hack cleanup.
Hopefully this is helpful. I have a bleeding heart for small businesses.
PM me and and we can work out a way to send files your way. But I think everything should be apparent at this point.
-
The site has been hacked. Let me put some more stuff together, but you will notice; "This site may be hacked" on search results under the URL when you do a site: operator search. See here: https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:abetterdriveway.com.au.
You should have received a message via GWT informing you of this. It's kind of odd that you didn't.
All I know is that I'm not going there on my Windows machine. Let me check it out with my 'down and dirty' rig. I'll get you some specifics a little later in the day.
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
-
Canonical URL's For Two Domains
We have two websites, one we use for Google PPC (website 1) and one (website 2) we use for everything else. The reason is we are in an industry that Google Adwords doesn't like, so we built a whole other website that removes the product descriptions as Google Adwords doesn't approve of many of them (nutrition). Right now we have that Google Adwords approved website (website 1) no-index/no-follow because we didn't want to run into potential duplicate content issues in free search, but the issue is we can't submit it to Google Shopping...as they require it to be indexable. Do you think removing the no-index/no-follow from that website 1 and adding canonical URL's pointing to website 2 would resolve this issue (being able to submit it to Google Shopping) and not cause any problems with duplicate content? I was thinking of adding the canonical tag to all pages of website 1 and point it to website 2. Does that make sense? Do you think that would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Could a HTML <select>with large numbers of <option value="<url>">'s affect my organic rankings</option></select>
Hi there, I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York. Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York. My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue. The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element. | <select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;"> <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option> <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option> <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option> <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option> <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option> <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option> <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option> <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select> Many thanks Mike |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
What's new with SEO in last 6 months?
Hi, I've been away from the SEO scene for about 6 months now. I was wondering if anyone could summerise what the big changes are and how one needs to approach an SEO strategy now compared to last year before this Penguine (?) update.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LoveChicken0 -
New Domain name vs Low Ranked Existing Site
I am going to build a new site. I could hang it off an existing site with similar content or buy a new keyword rich domain and start over. The existing site does not have much trust or authority beyond the domain being registered for 5 plus years. I would prefer to start over and build linksfrom scratch but I realize we are starting at the bottom. The keywords we will be competing against are not super competetive so I think we can get ranking within 6 months or so. These post Panda days I am rethinking everything so any input is appreciated. I did a similar niche site a few years ago and found the site ranked well fairly quickly for its little nice. Today though it may be different. I have no experience in buying domains and would have no idea where to start there. New or existing? Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less. I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages? Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0