Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff.

We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it.

Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way.

Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem.

It is a wordpress site is that helps.

Wow that is a horrible analogy. You really think fixing a computer and getting a website out of a Google penalty is the same thing or even close to being similar?

You act like I am trying to sell a service here or something. I am just providing information on the fact that I was actually successful.

It took a while for me to make the changes on the site because I had no idea what to change. We bought this site and it had a Google penalty... so I had to go through the site to figure out what could be wrong. Then went through it and tried to clean it up.

I came on here to find out if anyone has gone through the process of actually getting a site out of a Google penalty, but no one said they did. I do realize in Internet marketing, many people like to talk about how to do stuff, but very few actually do it.

Feel free to tell me that I am doing something wrong or my claims are false... but I am just telling the facts of what happen in my case... whether you feel its "troubling" is your problem.

Bottom line is after I finished making changes on the site sometime in July, 2 months later Google rankings have skyrocketed.  I dont know what is so troubling about that.

Figured I would update this... I made a lot of changes to the site before I placed this post on seomoz. Basically gave up on the site at the time I wrote this.

Spent about 2 months making changes trying to figure out what Google didnt like.

About a week ago I guess all the changes finally kicked in and traffic from Google has increased over 900%.

My original reason for posting this was to find someone who actually got a site out of the Google penalty. So if someone is reading this with a Google penalty, contact me and I will try to help.

In my case after I made all the changes it took about 2-3 months for Google to make the changes on their end. So dont expect things to happen overnight.

We run other sites with 5+ ad units that dominate the search engines for their theme... and Google actually sends emails to add more ad units.

I will try this though and see what happens.

Where in webmaster tools does it provide info on a penalty? Never seen that.

We bought some websites and we knew one of them had a penalty on it. Went through and took out all duplicate content and still nothing. It is on Wordpress.

The penalty started last summer. The other company has no clue what happened. They didnt do much in terms of SEO.

The site is monsterguide . net

If anyone has any ideas that would be great.

Things we have done were... got rid of all language pages, blocked search results, blocked basic wordpress folders, they had image galleries setup so each image was being indexed as its own page, that is now fixed, put canonical links on all pages.

Really appreciate any help.

Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?