Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.
-
I have a client who's site was hacked. The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists.
We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected. We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms).
There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned. In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists.
Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!
-
Are you absolutely sure there isn't something else going on? Usually Google is pretty good at picking up this type of thing and just discounting the links. Plus, if the links were generated to pages that didn't exist then they wouldn't be passing any signals (i.e. penalty) to the site. In fact, removing pages is a way to remove links. (See http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website)
You mentioned it happened about 6 weeks ago...I'm not sure if it fits, but 4 weeks ago there was a very large Panda update that upset a lot of site's rankings. Any chance the drop happened around May 20?
Have you checked WMT and sucuri.net for signs of malware? Often when pages get injected like that it comes along with malware.
I'd also look for things like accidental noindexing or blocking pages with robots.txt. I had three sites this week consult with me because they thought they had penalties and two had lost their analytics code and the other had accidentally noindexed the majority of their site.
If the ranking drop is indeed due to the bad links then you really should recover now that they've all been disavowed. But I'm guessing there's something else going on.
-
Thanks for your reply. Sent you a message.
-
Any chance you can share the URL here or via PM? Also, for the fake page showing up in GWT as the top priority, did you click on the link to see more details? Such as where it is being linked from? That might provide some insights as to why Googlebot is still trying to access that page.
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
-
Meta Keywords: Do They Hurt Rankings
I know that Google doesn't use meta keywords, but does it hurt to have anything in there? Just wondering if I need to remove all the meta keywords that are on my site, or are they harmless to have. Also, would meta keywords ever be used by an internal search plug-in if we were to install one in the future, or do they generally look at the product title and description for that info?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b4cab0 -
How long before your rankings improved after Penguin?
Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever? I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months. I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file. I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update. I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done. What are your experiences?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Help with homepage SEO please
Hi I have been looking after this site www.kids-academy.co.uk for 3 weeks now. I spotted that links were a major problem with the site and started to strip out the black hat inbound links straight away. I have also been doing some onsite optimisation for the main areas I have been asked to focus on. This saw results within a week for the subpages which is great. however, the design of the site meant there were no landing pages for the categories and the menu is a permanent "fixture" called a megamenu. I have advised /landingpages were needed not only for the ease of the end user to find what they need but also for SEO. Now the issues I have are that due to the menu style, it sees every one of those links within the homepage - over 200 links! I am wondering if I should nofollow some of them, or get them to change the style of the menu as surely this is having a direct result on the homepage and landing pages just not being seen at all within Google (as normal - Bing and Yahoo love the site). There is a lot of work to do on this site, but I would have thought to have seen some movement on the homepage at least by now. Any help is much appreciated. (Please note, there are some duplicate pages on there at the moment as I amalgamated some of the pages together last night and need to redirect these but I am having issues with redirect loops so those are not a contributing factor as this is a recent change). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeanneSEO
Leanne0 -
Dramatic Ranking Changes
Hi, My website is ranked on the 2nd page of Google for the /ncr. Last week suddenly it climbed up to the first page and I let my boss know about it with a quite enthusiasm and happiness 🙂 Then my boss didn't look at it on that day and next day our site was on the second page again and still is. Now I kind of lost reputation in the office, and people start questioning my comments. It wasn't a delusion but I would like to know what it was. No one does any SEO for this 10 years old site, and I've just started an SEO campaign about 1,5 months ago. And I really thought this is it, we are on the first page. But now we are back in to the 2nd page. Is waiting for couple days or weeks to Google to settle right approach for such cases? Or it was just a random bounce or coincidence? Never seen such thing, so I'm quite curious about your opinions or experience if you have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nunobaronio0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Not ranking on Bing but is on Google?
Hi What are the main differences between Bing and Google in terms of ranking sites? My site is ranking well in Google but in Bing it is very low down and does not deliver much traffic. In Bing webmaster tools there are no warning messages and I had sent in a sitemap back in 2011 and 77 pages are listed, but I had not submitted a URL could this be why my pages are not ranking highly? Or does anybody have a checklist on what a site should offer to get ranking on Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0