Here’s the question: It’s been over 2 weeks and our Google traffic has only returned to approx 35-40% of it pre-hacked levels. I would assume that traffic would come back to comparable levels, at least 80% of previous levels. No one has been able to provide an explaination.

The only consideration: our blog was the point of attack and was taken down. The new blog went up yesterday… a fully cleaned version, secured, etc. The blog was somewhat active, with approx 300 posts. But still… might provide some google links to the site.

Anyone…. an explaination? and if so, ideas or suggestions what I can do next to uncover any lingering issues or problems?

Thanks

Has Google a monopoly over the internet?

Here’s my problem. Google IS the search engine of choice. Many companies, like ours, depend on this search engine for our business. We’ve been online for over 11 years and never had a problem. All of a sudden, we get hacked and are now removed from Google for a minimum of 30-days. THAT HURTS! Especially for something that’s not our fault.

I think that Google should have a more expedited reconsideration process for first-time offenders and/or for sites that have a long, positive history.

One of my sites has just been hacked (first time). Fixed by moving the hosting. I now just have the very anxious wait to have the site re-included into your index. I had hoped I had acted quick enough – sadly not.

I looked for a website monitoring service that could possibly detect if one’s site has been hacked – without luck.

Do you know of one? Many thanks again.

I’ve read through most of the posts on this blog…Our site was attacked by malware two weeks ago. We received all of the blacklist e-mails from Google, and our site was fixed immediately. We are now in the process of having our site re-built in .asp.net platform with hopes of protecting our site from future attacks.

Our search terms were #1 or at least on the first page for the vast majority of our keywords, and now they’re gone. Our positions have completely dropped off. I know we are indexed because I can find some of our keywords ranked really low (ie page 10-20).

I’ve read a lot of posts on other forums of horror stories of people having fixed their sites and 3-4 months have passed, and their sites still haven’t been returned to their high rankings.

Your original post to Ryan (first post at top of page) said that his site would return to the top of search engines within a couple of days. Can you tell me why isn’t this happening for us?

We are also a paid advertiser and do upwards of $75K of advertising with Google, and our paid listings were able to be up within a couple of hours of us fixing our site.

What is your opinion on our situation? There is no way for us to gauge whether or not our placement will ever come back. Should we continue to wait, or try to start finding other ways to get our site back up to #1 on natural listings?

Thanks so much for your time,

Matt Morris

We run many websites. With the increasing sql injection attacks we found 2 sites with vulnerabilities had be hacked on the 13th of June. The hack places javascript links to malware on the site. On the 16th of june we saw Google traffic drop on both sites significantly.

We fixed the vulnerability and have submitted a reconsideration. My questions is:

Are the messages in the webmaster tools an automatted system?

Google was obviously aware of the issue and reacted in the best interest of the user. However we only discoved the issue days later and a message in the webmaster tools would have been very useful.