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My scan yielded that the Advanced Custom Field plugin is outdated and vulnerable.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
-
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch
We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites. The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions). I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites. I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
Google's Structured Data Testing Tool? No Data
I'm stumped as to why some of the pages on my website return no data from Google's Structured Data Testing Tool while other pages work fine and return the appropriate data. My home page http://www.parkseo.net returns no data while many inner pages do. http://www.parkseo.net Returns No Data http://www.parkseo.net/citation-submission.html Does Return Data. I have racked my brains out trying to figure out why some pages return data and others don't. Any help on this issue would be greatly appricated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary Downey0 -
Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain
My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later. What can be causing this? The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often). It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Rel canonical element for different URL's
Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline0 -
DCMI and Google's rich snippets
I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata. Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin? As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata? It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo0