Recovering in Google From Malware Attack

eatchiken · Dec 20, 2012

Not sure if this is the right section of the forums, but here it goes.

Around the end of Nov beginning of Dec I noticed a huge drop in SERPS. Day before yesterday I finally discovered my site had been hit with malware and there was a bunch of spammy code just after the body tag.

As soon as I found this, I cleaned it up, signed up for Sucuri, they went over my FTP files and found the rest + deleted and now my website is 100% clean and back to "normal".

Within 12-14 hours of cleaning everything up, I noticed my rankings ALL bounced back to where they were. That was about 24 hours ago. Now when I check, everything has plummeted in to the Google black-hole, again.

My question is: Is it normal for this to happen? How long will it take for my site to FULLY recover and rankings stabilize (if at all)?

Any advice, tips, stories of past experiences would be great! Thanks in advance.

-C

jeromespitfire · Dec 20, 2012

Double check you haven't been hacked again. Probably just a dance, and will come back very soon if there are no problems with your site. Or else it could be another problem altogether, may a google animal got you!

Getwhatchuwant · Dec 20, 2012

eatchiken said:
Not sure if this is the right section of the forums, but here it goes.

Around the end of Nov beginning of Dec I noticed a huge drop in SERPS. Day before yesterday I finally discovered my site had been hit with malware and there was a bunch of spammy code just after the body tag.

As soon as I found this, I cleaned it up, signed up for Sucuri, they went over my FTP files and found the rest + deleted and now my website is 100% clean and back to "normal".

Within 12-14 hours of cleaning everything up, I noticed my rankings ALL bounced back to where they were. That was about 24 hours ago. Now when I check, everything has plummeted in to the Google black-hole, again.

My question is: Is it normal for this to happen? How long will it take for my site to FULLY recover and rankings stabilize (if at all)?

Any advice, tips, stories of past experiences would be great! Thanks in advance.

-C

With my current employer I run several sites, one of the sites had decent rankings was hacked and then dropped. Even after removing all the crap it still struggles for rankings and this particular niche is much easier than 2 others that we are doing better in. I am thinking that there must be some flag or something that causes google not to trust the site anymore, we have better links, better content, plenty of age but the site just does not want to take its rightful position. If anyone has experience with this situation let me know.

eatchiken · Dec 20, 2012

Getwhatchuwant said:
With my current employer I run several sites, one of the sites had decent rankings was hacked and then dropped. Even after removing all the crap it still struggles for rankings and this particular niche is much easier than 2 others that we are doing better in. I am thinking that there must be some flag or something that causes google not to trust the site anymore, we have better links, better content, plenty of age but the site just does not want to take its rightful position. If anyone has experience with this situation let me know.

:vroam:

eatchiken · Dec 20, 2012

The funny thing is that before I even found the malware, I submitted my site to google for reconsideration and they came back saying everything was fine and there was no manual action taken by their webspam team. I hope it's only a matter of time (a SHORT amount of time) before this fixes itself.

PS. Checked site again... Everything looks good.

englandrm · Dec 20, 2012

Yes, double check you haven't been hacked again, and make sure that Google isn't seeing anymore malware on the site.

Based on the bounce, it sounds normal. It't not the same situation, but one of my clients was doing some Penguin Recovery. He was ranked at the top for everything, got hit, and then when he recovered he had a similar affect happen. He bounced right back to his normal position, and then disappeared for ~3 weeks. After that, he came back to his old position.

I'm assuming that you're basically back to where you are, but it will take some time to stay there. I would push some light and high quality SEO on the site, just to encourage those rankings to return sooner.

Hope that helps. Thanks. ~englandrm

eatchiken · Dec 20, 2012

englandrm said:
Yes, double check you haven't been hacked again, and make sure that Google isn't seeing anymore malware on the site.

Based on the bounce, it sounds normal. It't not the same situation, but one of my clients was doing some Penguin Recovery. He was ranked at the top for everything, got hit, and then when he recovered he had a similar affect happen. He bounced right back to his normal position, and then disappeared for ~3 weeks. After that, he came back to his old position.

I'm assuming that you're basically back to where you are, but it will take some time to stay there. I would push some light and high quality SEO on the site, just to encourage those rankings to return sooner.

Hope that helps. Thanks. ~englandrm

I double checked everything and it all looks good to me. Sucuri also has server side scanners that run every 24 hours or less I believe.

Some of my inner pages have not been crawled and refreshed by Google yet and I can see the malware when viewing the code of the cached version of page.

Light SEO is already in the works as well as daily social signals all across a few different social networks.

Hoping things return to "normal" sooner than later. Should I contact Google in any way and tell them what the situation is? Or just give it a month or so and see what happens?

psilon · Dec 20, 2012

You should probably wait another 2 weeks or so and then if no result contact google. I must admit I'm not accomplished at SEO. My reasoning is only that a) rankings might bounce back on their own with the regular googlebot doing its job and b) you might piss them(the human teams) off if you send them a complaint this close to Christmas/new year.

englandrm · Dec 20, 2012

It's not going to be immediate, so yeah, waiting a few weeks is a good idea. If nothing happens by then, try and submit a reconsideration request. Tell them you cleaned up the malware but still haven't gotten your rankings back; and they should respond in a few days.

Recovering in Google From Malware Attack

eatchiken

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