Is a recent hack or the disavow tool causing my alarming dropping in rankings!

[seounicorn]

My business site has been very successful organically for many years. Just recently we got hit with a spam hack and it was resolved within 3 days. However now my rankings are plummeting and I am so stressed out! So here is some timeline information any info would help:

• Sept. 4th hack first detected on Google
• Sept. 7th site completely clean, reconsideration accepted, spam content and links removed. Manual actions cleared. Rankings at this time have not been affected.
• Sept. 11th disavowed a few incoming links that were completely spam. (In hindsight I know this could have been the beginning of the end using this tool)
• Sept. 21st start to notice first significant drop in rankings and I went into GWT and downloaded latest 1000 links, I realized ALL of these were either hacked sites as well with spam content linking to our now delete spam content or inappropriate adult content.
• Sept. 22 Disavowed the 1000 domains (there are still probably 1000-2000 more)
• As of today rankings have SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, I have resubmitted sitemaps, image sitemaps, fetch and rendered as google.

I'm stressing out incredibly and feel like I have made an error and that my site will never recover. I've worked using ALL white hat seo and the site used to rank very well top of page one for almost all my keywords. I feel lost and don't know what else I can do - and I know many say wait but it feels like forever.

Is it possible that I didn't make a mistake using the disavow and that Google just took a while to penalize for the hack? Please any advice or experiences I would love to hear and appreciate so much anyone who takes the time to respond.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Kristin,

I have left a pretty detailed message in private messages I hope that is helpful please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Respectfully,

Thomas

[seounicorn]

Hi James,

I am sorry to hear that you have experienced this too. If you don't mind me asking what happened as a result of the negative SEO campaign? Are you experiencing similar ranking issues and how long has it been? Did you follow the steps I did or any others ones?

[seounicorn]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for your response. I have private messaged you further details along with a link to my site. I really appreciate you taking the time to over expertise on my issue.

[BlueprintMarketing]

First off I am extremely sorry to hear that you're the victim of negative SEO it is unbelievably frustrating and needs to be dealt with in a very methodical manner.

I do not believe the disavowed tool is what's hurting you. It  much more likely there is still something in your site that is allowing this hack to continue no matter what you have to do monitor the site make sure it is not carrying any malware.

Did you have a backup of the site? After the the with a spam hack?

The fact that the attack was detected by Google and you had a manual penalty is extremely unfortunate.

Because most businesses are obviously smart enough not to direct pornography and other spam URLs to their site many times Google must reevaluate the site taking into consideration that this happened and no one was there to catch it.

I literally got done with a disavowal on a site that had been penalized manually and it surprisingly went up very quickly in the rankings. Once the bad URLs were deleted. I have to stress in this case bad back links had almost no authority.

I honestly feel that you are getting a lot of juice from the bad back links and by disavowing them something you had to do obviously you have lost the juice the site had before.

• "Sept. 21st start to notice first significant drop in rankings and I went into GWT and downloaded latest 1000 links, I realized ALL of these were either hacked sites as well with spam content linking to our now delete spam content or inappropriate adult content."

Was this a content injection? is that why you're saying now deleted spam content or inappropriate adult? The reason I ask is if the person did a content injection wrote over your existing content and you deleted it that would do a real lot of damage.

• Sept. 22 Disavowed the 1000 domains (there are still probably 1000-2000 more)

I would recommend doing link disavows I know that does not sound fun. What are you planning to do about the 1-2000 more how many more are accumulating every day?

• As of today rankings have SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, I have resubmitted sitemaps, image sitemaps, fetch and rendered as google.

I would honestly need to know a lot more about your site to tell you the best step forward but one thing I can tell you is you need to figure out if you are deleting content that had regular links to it and are destroying website because somebody did a content injection and wrote over content that was already on your website.

Let me know if you're willing to share your domain with me via private message or hear I would be happy to take a look without understanding if the site is still hacked you can do some things like check using  https://sitecheck.sucuri.net to see if there is any blatant malware still on the site.

I would start there and I would add a WAF companies like Sucuri & incapsula are lifesavers when it comes to keeping this type of attack from happening.

Make sure your CMS is up-to-date if you're using one.

I hope this helps I do not think it is the disavowed tool if these are new links but that would depend on how long you have been keeping track of your links all that would need to be checked.

Respectfully,

Thomas Zickell