I had a wp blog which was hacked. The hacker had inserted tons of spammy links on the homepage, which went undetected for a while. I think its more then a coincidence that the site seems to have received a penalty of some sort for specific keywords (going from first page rankings to dropping off the radar completely). Would you contact Google in this situation or just fix up the issue and play the waiting game?
Contact Google at the Google Webmaster Central and send a re-inclusion request. If they approved you will start getting indexed again. Also update your copy of wordpress.
See this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=866284 I filed for a reinclusion. I got back my rankings. The hacker again hacked my blog and put those spammy links. Now I am again penalized. Do you know how exactly you were hacked? Are you using the latest version?
As I said, deindexing and getting reinstated isn't the problem. The site is still indexed. The site was ranking first page before this "penalty" and now doesn't rank for this keyword anymore.
Even in case of penalties, you can file a reconsideration request. Earlier Google used to call it "Reiclusion", but now it is known "Reconsideration". Google Webmaster Help Center. In last few weeks, 1000's of Wordpress blogs have been hacked and most of them have been penalized by Google.
Ah right, sorry I misunderstood. Thanks for your help it's appreciated. Why do hackers have to cause so much trouble. Afterall, Turkey had a great victory in Euro
You may also want to see this: Did your WordPress site get hacked? Check your database for hidden links in posts. I suggest that instead of doing an upgrade, you delete all old files and do a fresh install. This is because upgrade only replaces the old files. However if the hacker has dropped some additional malicious file, upgrade won't affect it. Only a complete deletion of files can remove it. You can't delete your database, so you will have to throughly check for hidden links.
You can if you make backups The hacker had inserted the links in the database, so I had to restore an older version.
This just happened to me as well - somehow a spammer got into my WordPress blog and added thousands of crappy credit card links into the header. What's worse is that Yahoo! was my hosting provider and they said it messed up my server so they disabled my site! In the mean time, my site dropped from page 1 of Google into oblivion Now I'm trying to transfer the domain and get it set up elsewhere. Anyone know how this can happen? Not a strong enough password?
This is so screwed up, I would recommend that you start over. Even if you want to copy and paste, you can't trust the code any longer.
Well I removed the blog off of my domain completely, and bought an entirely new domain just for it. Now I'm going to get a fresh install of WordPress and do exactly that - copy and paste all of the blog posts into the new one - it's really such a pain! Then I'll see if G can help me get my rankings back What a nightmare... and this was my best performing site.