How recovering the ranking after an hacking

[AlessiaCamera]

Hello,

I'm Alexia and a few months ago (end of March) my site has been hacked: hackers have created more than 30.000 links in Japanese to sell tires.

I've successfully removed the hack and after 14 days of struggle even decided to change the domain to Siteground as they've been really keen to help.

I still have some problems and I desperately need your tips.

• In search console, Google is informing about the +30.000 404 errors due to the content created by hackers which is not available anymore. I've been advised to redirect those links to 410 as they might have penalty effects in the SERP

• I have 50 503 server errors recognised by Google back in April but still there. What should I do to solve them?

• I still have a lot of traffic from Japan, even if I've removed all the content and ask Googled to disavow spamming backlinks. Do you think I have on page keywords? I don't understand how they can still find me.

• Those KWs are indexed in analytics, but not effective clicks, as the content is not there anymore. I also asked Google to remove links in search console with the tool removing links but not all of my requests have been accepted.

• My site disappeared from the organic results even if it hasn't been recognised as hacked in Google (there wasn't any manual actions on the Search Console). What can I do to gain the organic positioning once again? I've just tried to use the “Fetch as Google” option on search console for the entire website.

Thank you all and I look forward to your replies.

Thanks!

Alessia

[JonoAlderson]

Hey Alessia,

So, there are quite a few moving parts here; let's go through them one by one...

When you say that you've changed domain to siteground, what does that mean, exactly? There are a lot of nuances and a lot of potential complexity surrounding changing domains and sites; something I've written about recently on Moz. It'd be good to understand whether this was a just a domain migration (and if so, how it was managed), or something more complex or comprehensive.

If you could answer that, it'd provide a lot of useful context for helping to diagnose your problem, and working towards some options/answers.

In the meantime...

• With regards to the traffic you're still getting from Japan, I wouldn't be too concerned. It's doubtful that it's harming you, although, if it's coming through as a result of a hacked site, I'd wonder if some/all of it might actually be bot traffic - are you tracking it in Google Analytics / similar, and can you get a feel for whether it looks like normal browsing behaviour (or something a little more robotic)?
• With regards to the errors reported in Search Console, I wouldn't worry too much. If you're confident that you've resolved the issue, the error reports are just paperwork - they don't harm you in any way, and you can tick them off a little at a time. Unfortunately, there's no fast way to do this, and you can only remove 100 (I think?) per day, without using their API; but it really doesn't matter too much. Still, it's worthwhile clearing them out, because you'll want to be able to see any new or remaining issues in the future.

[AlessiaCamera]

I did everything, my site is clean now.

My question is: which are the next steps in terms of SEO? Obviously, my ranking is not the same as before and I'm looking for replies to all the questions I asked in my message. Thanks

[JonoAlderson]

Hey Alessia,

Just wanted to ping you a note to let you know that I'm looking at and thinking about this, and intending to get back to you tomorrow with a structured answer and some direction.

[benesmartin]

Hey Alessia,

It's quite challenging to recover after your site was hacked.

In this case, I'd recommend doing all the steps in this article and then request a review by Google itself to look at your site and mark it as healthy again.

Try this first and if you need any further help, feel free to let me know. Cheers, Martin