Hacked & Lost Rankings

[bravemem]

Hi, we're are struggling for solutions on our client's site so any help would be great. Tha

August 4th - We received notice from Google that our website was hacked (Manual Action)

This was a server hack from GoDaddy. Our WP installations have not been affected.

Google indexed 1.8k pharma spam pages.

August 8th - Full Cleanup by GoDaddy Confirmed

August 9th - Submitted Reconsideration Request

August 11th - Reconsideration Request Accepted

August 21st - Using the Remove URL's Features in GSC, we are back down to the normal 10 indexed pages.

After all of this, they are not back to their original page 1 search positions. They're currently not even within the top 100 results.

Is there anything we might have missed?

Thanks for your help

 

[Greg Schueler]

Can you post the link? Or message it to me?
It sounds like you covered the bases, but without seeing, it is hard to say.

Some things I could guess at would be; make sure the Sitemap is updated with just the real pages, make sure no hidden links were left on the real pages. And it may take some time, even if the warning labels are removed, for Google to re-crawl the site and re-determine what the site is really about since 99.99% of the site was about Pharma until it was cleared.

 

[bravemem]

Thanks for the reply Greg. I'll PM you the URL.

The sitemap is clean and no bad URL's on the site anymore, confirmed with Screaming Frog.

 

[JoyHawkins]

If you're able to post the URL on the thread, that would definitely help increase the # of people that can respond and chime in with advice

 

[bravemem]

I was just being super impatient.

This past weekend, things have begun resuming back to normal.

Continued effort on the Remove URL's feature has been helping a lot.

Thanks

 

[JoyHawkins]

Haha - I was actually going to say it probably hasn't been enough time. It's hard to be patient in these situations.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

This isn't going to make you all that happy, but I experienced two website hacks with clients hosted on Godaddy servers. They contacted me after the damage was done, so I had to scrub the server and then moved them to a new host. I don't trust Godaddy anymore, and I hope you consider moving your site too in the near future.

Anyway... after the cleanups, because the sites were so small, it took a while to bounce back. You can fetch and recrawl, submit the pages, ping them from other sites/services, but after that you still need to wait for Google to recrawl the site (like others have mentioned). It took some time to get them back up in good standing.

Is your site bouncing back or are you still in limbo?

 

[bravemem]

Thanks Eric,

Things have returned back to page 1 for 2 out of the 4 keywords, primarily bouncing around #9/#10. Awaiting the return back to #5.

We are still doing Remove URL's cleanup, as you can see by the screenshot. We're hopeful once Google only shows the normal 10 indexed pages, things will go back to normal.

Thanks for your input .