Hacked website for a long time . Difficult Case

[bougpan8]

Greeting to all members of the forum.

I am very happy because i have found a live forum with many information regarding google search. I have read most of the articles in internet and i am a little frustuated because all these provide static information. When i found this forum i was so happy to found personal problems and solutions and I have already read about one hundred of threads.
Sorry for my bad English i will try to do my best because English is not my first language.

Some quick information for the past:
We have a small local business in Greece and we own a website for about 6 years. We depend on tourists and for us this website is very important. For the first 4 years our website was in page 1 on google listing. However I think that the person who builded our website back then used some black hat seo . Anyway after the 4th year our website have been hacked. We cleaned it and later it got hacked again. The guy that have builded our website informed us that the joomla version was very old and it will keep getting hacked. Only solution was to build a brand new website. Badly for us we didn't. Every 2 months our website was hacked , we cleaned it to be hacked again some days later.

Now 2 years later:
After I learned many things about coding I have built our new Website from scratch. Again in Joomla but completely different. I burned the old website in the old web host provider. I made another subscription to a new host provider and then I uploaded our brand new website there. Then transfered the old domain to the new host provider. Then Validated to google webmaster tools our new website . After that I have optimized everything I could in our website. I used all programs that google provides , schema markup , page insight and also another seo checkup online website information. We also have the only google+ local account with 41 real reviews of 5 stars and also a famous facebook page. Now I am sure that our website is way far better from our local competition . I followed all google guidelines and didn't do any bad practice seo. Then I forced google to crawl our new website from webmaster tools.

The problem :
Google picked up the links and indexed them. Forgot to mention that in the new website I builded different pages for small villages that we serve tourists. Thinking that we need close area seo too. Now our new website ranks excelent in the first 5 results in page 1 for all these small villages search queries. But if we make a search for the city that we are located we are always in page 7 in google. Nothing seems to make things better. I am thinking of a permanent penalty for the city that we are located queries. Can it be a specific keyword permanent penalty ?
Because all these small villages that now bring us to page 1 didn't exist in the old website.
Some more information: I found in webmaster tools about 1500 spam backlinks and I have already disavow all of them.
Google seems to be very sensitive in the slightest changes in the website . One day i try to leave a possitive post in tripadvisor for our company without commenting the url of our website, only our brand name. After 4 hours google picked up the comment and sent all search querries in the page 12 or 13. Also the pages for the small villages that were on 1st page went to page 13. Then i decided to remove the post from tripadvisor. The next day the page for small villages were again in the 1st page and for the city we are located in page 7.

I would like to post here the website or some other information so you can see your self how search querries are but I am very sure that google will send me again to the bottom if I do that. So if someone want to check please ask me and I will provide more information in PM.

Should i burn the old domain and make a new one with a slight difference ? I am sure that our website is the best in the local competition however google seems to hate us.

I would be very happy to hear everything you can think of.
Thank you very much

 

[Eric Rohrback]

can you post a link for others to investigate further? It's not easy to give any real recommendations from a hypothetical. We have no idea what was done offsite for the domain (you mentioned black hat... so the old webmaster built links?), and it's hard to do even a high level check without a domain.

 

[bougpan8]

It seems we have a serious hangover from the old website. I have removed with disavow all bad links i found in webmaster tools(about 1400) . I have done this before 1 week. This seems however not to be enough.

Is it possible for our website to have a penalty for a specific keyword ? When i make a query with "kalamata" which is the city we are located we are indexed in page 8. If i make queries with cities far away from kalamata we have way better results. Also kalamata is included in our domain. Is it possible a specific keyword algorithmic penalty?

I am going to give an example
In compare with one of our competitors we are indexed better from him if we make a query in his city . However if we make a query to our city every one is better indexed than we are including the previous competitor. Sounds like a location penalty from the old website?

I will give with PM the website to anyone interested. However if I post it here google will punish me very hard and send me again to the bottom. It have happened to me before.

 

[bougpan8]

Ok , after my last post i have changed many things.

I tried to change page content thinking that i maybe have a keyword stuff penalty for our location " Kalamata " . Didn't work

I tried to disavow many links that webmaster tools show to me. I kept only 12 links that are usefull. Nothing changed

I have one question and if somebody can answer it I will be very happy

When I was searching for the links I saw something very strange. In many of the local citations that we are registered the address is wrong. It is a frustuation because in our city this road where our company is , when it was builded our people here named it with a name and we used that name for some time but the goverment and also google maps gave to it another name. So in the citations our company is registered with a local name that we only know and in google maps it is registered with another name.
Now I can understand why we are so low in the google map search.
However can this frustuation give us a penalty in organic search in google ?

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Hi
I've never heard of "keyword penalties", but poor page quality is certainly a ranking factor. So if you've done a lot of keyword stuffing, then yes your page quality will be low and that will be impacting your efforts.

How long ago did you change the website over?

Did you put in redirects so pages from the old site point to the new site? If not, that will badly disrupt rankings until Google gets the new site fully indexed and the old site removed from the index.

Do you have any messages in Search Console? Any crawl errors?

Also, if you'd do as Eric asked, and post a link for us to look at, we might be able to offer some more detailed assistance.

 

[bougpan8]

Ok it seems I am on a dead end. I dont know what else I should do.

I will post my website here but please administrators if I ask to remove it later it will be because my website will be crushed again to the bottom from a penalty.

I will post it with a safe way. It is goo.gl/
and then 0yJGQE

So anyone that will visit my site. What we want to rank for is for car rental. So you will see the coresponding menu in our website. This is the page we want to rank.
A Hint and tip that I have not yet decrypted is :
If you search for "car rental kardamili " we rank very well first or second page
If you search for "car rental koroni" again very good.
Keep in mind these are areas far away from us. We are located in kalamata which is near kalamata airport.
Now try to search for " car rental kalamata " or "car rental kalamata airport" . Here we have a serious problem!

It is about 1 month since the change of the website. It is a new website so I made only some 301 redirects . In the page that interests us more "car rental "I have made 301 redirect and before about 10 days the old url got deindexed and the new one got indexed.
However in the old website we were never indexed for "car rental kardamili " and "car rental koroni" . So right after I changed the website and asked for recrawl google indexed these pages directly and in very good positions.

Sorry for my bad English again. I try my best.
Thanks for all the support.
Best Regards , Peter

 

[bougpan8]

I am going to post here how things go like a diary so can anyone find usefull infomation in the future. I hope this is not bad for the forum administrators.

So Today I ranked 2 pages better in the querries I wanted. This is so great! What I did? I only made a page for my business in Linked In . Although the link is no follow I think this gives a signal that my company is real and has more authority. I started thinking that after 2 years of a hacked website the search engine does not trust my domain. Maybe I need to send more Trust signals.Next I am going to claim my account also in foursquare.

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Couple of quick observations.

The location pages are a little shallow in terms of content. Short pages can be good, but they need to be powerful.

Consider adding more content about the cars available, questions people might have about driving in the area, anything that would be useful and unique for driving/parking/renting cars in that area.

As a side note, one month is very short for the search engines to crawl completely through a new site and recognise the new content there. I recommend clients look more realistically at a 90 day time-frame, as it looks as though the site has undergone significant changes.

I'm also seeing a mix of "www" and non-www versions of pages in Google's index. Whatever you want the site to be, make sure the site, Search Console, and Google Analytics are set the same. To Google, a www and a non-www can be two different sites.

I also checked a couple of what look to be the "old" site pages and received a 404. This implies the old pages have not been redirected to the new pages. Not only does this slow the process down for Google in terms of recrawling the site, but you also stand to potentially lose any incoming links, and your Search Console Crawl errors will likely be climbing.

It may well be you want to loose the incoming links, so if that's the case you might not want to put redirects in. If that's the case, then you'll need to start a link building campaign. That takes patience and effort.

 

[bougpan8]

Mrs Margaret Ornsby

At first i read your informations but didn't made anything. I tried my best to disavow all bad links and make new relative links. Some promotion of my website in the local forums and many other things. Nothing made a big difference. I lifted 1,2,3 positions but i was still in the page 5 .

Then desperate I came back to the forum to post how everything is not working out . And then i read your tips once again. I asked my self what I have to loose. I must give a try. Added more information to my page that was special . These information everyone that visited my website would be interested in reading.

Asked for re crawl. Then Boom!!!!. From page 5 or page 6 rankings directly to page 1 or 2!!!

Thank you very much for your great forum, and for your very usefull information.
Mrs Margaret Ornsby you are the Best!!

Best Regards ,
Peter

 

[bougpan8]

To administrator.

Please consider the topic Fixed!!

Please remove my short url reference in my 4th post.