More than 450 Pages Created by a hacker
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am in charge of the Spanish SEO for an international company, related to security. A couple of months ago, I realized that my Spanish/keywords/post all vanished from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duckduckgo.
Then I noticed that somebody in command of the main website used a disavow all!
I was in shock, as all of you can imagine. Knowing that all the inbound links were spam score under 4, highly relevant and so.
Later on, I was informed that the website was hacked and somebody took that action. Of course, it did not solved the issue.
I continue researching and found those pages - "Online%20Games%20-%20Should%20Parents%20Worry%20Or%20Celebrate%3F" - all of them like this one.
I informed the owner of the website - he is not my client - my client is the Spanish Manager. They erased the pages, of course plus sent all those, to avoid the 404 responses, to the homepage with a 301.
My heart stopped at that point!
I asked them to send all those with a redirect 301 to a new hidden page with nofollow and noindex directives.
We recover, my keywords/pages are in the first page again. Although the DA fell 7 points and no inbound links for now. I asked for the disavow file "to rewrite it", not received yet.
Any better ideas? Encountered a similar issue? How did you solved it?
Thanks in advance. -
Hi Andy,
Thank you very much for sharing your experience with the issue.
I will do as you said, asking for a standard related to communication. Sadly, as far as I know, at the other side of the line there is plenty of developers, although without no comprehension of SEO.
Despite that, it is a pleasure to work for a very technical niche and my client is fully supportive. Also, it helps to develop a quick thinking regarding SEO technical issues; which is not my field of expertise.
I shall share your advice about the Wordfence plugin premium.
Thanks again. All the best,Mª Verónica B.
-
Hi
Firstly it seems like you did all the right steps to resolve the issue. A while back I had a similar issue with my site and later a client's site that got hacked. They were both WordPress sites so now always recommend Wordfence plugin (premium) to stop the hack in the first place.
I wouldn't worry too much about the drop in DA, DA goes up and down all the time - it's only relative to your competitors. If your competitors go up and you go down that's when I would worry.
You are right in wanting the disavow file - its needs an audit and updating. I would just keep chasing and explaining you are potentially losing revenue and profit (they probably don't get the impact of rankings, but if you explain it in something which they do they will respond quicker). Once you have the file it's up to you to audit and amend as necessary, but this won't affect your Moz DA.
I would also ask them what processes they have put in place to stop getting hacked again if your doing all this work and the client hasn't changed how they operate, it could be a lot of time spent for nothing.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
I show different versions of the same page to the crawlers and users, but do not want to do anymore
Hello, While Google could not read JavaScript, I created two versions of the same page, one of them is for human and another is for Google. Now I do not want to serve different content to the search engine. But, I am worry if I will lose my traffic value. What is the best way to succeed it without loss? Can you help me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kipra0 -
Permanently Moving Few High Ranking Pages from One Domain to Another
We are planning to move few high ranking pages permanently (301 Permanent Redirection) to another domain, Currently these pages are getting good traffic from organic search and ranking on top positions in Google search engine result pages. We have few questions in our mind right now, It would be a great help if anyone can answer following questions; Is it possible to move few pages from one domain to another by using 301 Redirection in .htaccess file? Will it have any negative impact on our website's current search engine performance? Will it be considered as a legitimate SEO practice by Google Search Engine? Will Google understand that these pages have been moved permanently to another domain and start showing URL's from the new domain on the same positions where they were ranking before moving to new location?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
How/why is this page allowed to get away with this?
I was doing some research on a competitor's backlinks in Open Site Explorer and I noticed that their most powerful link was coming from this page: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc. I visited that page and found that this page, carrying a PageRank of 7, is just a long list of followed links. That's literally all that's on the entire page - 618 links. Zero nofollow tags. PR7. On top of that, there's a link at the top right corner that says "Want to Join?" which shows requirements to get your link on that page. One of these is to create a reciprocal link from your site back to theirs. I'm one of those white-hat SEOs who actually listens to Matt Cutts, and the more recent stuff from Moz. This entire page basically goes against everything I've been reading over the past couple years about how reciprocal links are bad, and if you're gonna do it, use a nofollow tag. I've read that pages, or directories, such as these are being penalized by Google, and possible the websites with links to the page could be penalized as well. I've read that exact websites such as these are getting deindexed by the bunches over the past couple years. My real question is how is this page allowed to get away with this? And how are they rewarded with such high PageRank? There's zero content aside from 618 links, all followed. Is this just a case of "Google just hasn't gotten around to finding and penalizing this site yet" or am I just naive enough to actually listen and believe anything that comes out of Matt Cutts videos?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Millermore0 -
Thin Content Pages: Adding more content really help?
Hello all, So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links). The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add. We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting. Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Page not being indexed or crawled and no idea why!
Hi everyone, There are a few pages on our website that aren't being indexed right now on Google and I'm not quite sure why. A little background: We are an IT training and management training company and we have locations/classrooms around the US. To better our search rankings and overall visibility, we made some changes to the on page content, URL structure, etc. Let's take our Washington DC location for example. The old address was: http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/location.aspx?id=uswd44 And the new one is: http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training All of the SEO changes aren't live yet, so just bear with me. My question really regards why the first URL is still being indexed and crawled and showing fine in the search results and the second one (which we want to show) is not. Changes have been live for around a month now - plenty of time to at least be indexed. In fact, we don't want the first URL to be showing anymore, we'd like the second URL type to be showing across the board. Also, when I type into Google site:http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training I'm getting a message that Google can't read the page because of the robots.txt file. But, we have no robots.txt file. I've been told by our web guys that the two pages are exactly the same. I was also told that we've put in an order to have all those old links 301 redirected to the new ones. But still, I'm perplexed as to why these pages are not being indexed or crawled - even manually submitted it into Webmaster tools. So, why is Google still recognizing the old URLs and why are they still showing in the index/search results? And, why is Google saying "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" Thanks in advance! Pedram
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
How does someone rank page one on google for one domain for over 150 keywords?
A local seo is exclaiming his fantastic track record for a pool company(amonst others) in our local market. Over 150 keywords on page one of google. I checked out a few things using some moz tools and didn't find anything that would suggest that this has come from white hat strategies, tactics or links etc. Interested in how he is doing this and if it is white hat? Thanks, C
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | charlesgrimm0 -
User comments with page content or as a separate page?
With the latest Google updates in both cracking down on useless pages and concentrating on high quality content, would it be beneficial to include user posted comments on the same page as the content or a separate page? Having a separate page with enough comments on it would he worth warranting, especially as extra pages add extra pagerank but would it be better to include them with the original article/post? Your ideas and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter2640 -
Influence of users' comments on a page (on-page SEO)
Do you think when Google crawls your page, it "monitors" comments updates to use this as a ranking factor? If Google is looking for social signs, looking for comments updates might be a social sign as well (ok a lot easier to manipulate, but still social). thx
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gt30