Actions Google Take After Site Hacked?

One of my websites was recently hacked and had malicious code installed upon it.

If this in itself was not bad enough google had me on 'malicious sites warning' for around 24 hours afterwards.

Since this though it appears that I am getting next to no organic searches compared to before. My site has been verified 100% virus free from several sorces, including stopbadware and google itself, I would have thought google would have restored me to my previous position!

My main question is whether or not google drops your position in the SERPs based on this?

 

have you removed the malicious code

After removing the code you have to inform them for reinclusion...

 

I don't have an answer. But I saw some search results with "security warnings" on the top of Google's SERPs.

It may happen that you'll need to gain the pagerank anew. And it may take some time for Google to crawl the backlinks. By the way, have the PR changed?

 

The sites PR is steady and you can find it by searching its name in google.

All the malicious code has been removed and google have removed the malicious coding, the stop badware site they use has also given my site the all clear.

It just seems that my site has been penalised somewhere in googles algorythm for having malicious code distributed from it in the pas, even if just for a few hours.

Has anyone else had a similar problem?

 

All I can say is I feel sorry for you. I sure hope that none of my sites get hacked - people need a life - other than hacking sites.

 

I guess that stopping malware is pretty high on their priority list but reinvestigating and undoing the penalty is low on their priority list. Its' reasons like this that hackers should go to jail.e

 

it will take about 2 months or more in my experience on 2006. you may contact them to re inclusion, but you better start more link backing to your website to catch a good eye on your site.

 

well, I had a hacker problem, not the same as you, but they hacked the whole server where my site was on and it took us over a week to clean it al up and reinstall everything and since then the site has never been the same with google

it is a shame that google punishes you even more when you have already been abused by a hacker, my site was only down for a couple weeks maximum

 

Google treats its "This site may harm your computer" warnings as a separate issue from PageRank and SERP standings. As a result, when a site gets flagged, it can retain its SERP positions, but the entries have the warning flag on them, which drastically reduces traffic.

However, there is a way by which getting flagged can have a permanent effect, and it emphasizes how important it is to clean your site quickly after it gets flagged:

One of the ways a site can get flagged is by linking to another flagged site. If other sites link to yours, and your site gets hacked and "badware-flagged", and if that flag stays in effect for a while, the sites that link to you will also get flagged. If they notice it and investigate the cause, they may remove the links to your site to solve their own badware-flag problem.

In this scenario, even after you clean your site and get the flag removed, you have lost the inlinks from the other sites, and this loss may be permanent because the other sites aren't very happy about you getting their sites flagged. So you suffer a permanent loss of PR as a result of the flagging.

The sites that seem to suffer the most from a long-term drop in rankings are the ones that are slowest to act when they find that their site is flagged. This probably doesn't apply to you, ThisIsOli, because from the sound of it, you cleaned the site quickly.

In theory, you should be able to clean your site, suffer no permanent loss of ranking, and have traffic eventually return to normal, but that happy scenario is more likely if you act within a day or two of getting flagged. Sites that dawdle around for a week, or two, or a month or more may suffer losses that take many months to resolve.

Another way the losses can become permanent is if your returning visitors abandon you. People who visit your site from their Favorites list don't see the Google (or Yahoo) warnings, but when they get to your site they may get a warning from their antivirus software that your site has a virus. Those people will probably delete your site from their Favorites, and they might never come back.

In this respect, the Google warning (and the loss of traffic) is a good thing for a webmaster. People don't remember the "This site may harm your computer" warning very much, but if they visit your site and actually get attacked by a virus, they'll never forget it.

-----

Once a site is found clean by Google or StopBadware, the warning used to get removed within 1-3 days, but in the past 2 months I have seen more complaints from webmasters saying that it is taking longer than that. As I recall, their help page says it may take 2 weeks, so they are still within their own guidelines, even though they are not up to their previous standards.

I don't know the reason for the slowdown, but I can speculate:

Maybe a huge increase in hacked sites that their badware crawlers can't keep up with? They crawl a site very thoroughly and repeatedly before lifting the flag.

Or maybe they've seen so many hacked sites get re-hacked within days that they won't remove the flag anymore until a site manages to stay clean for several days? Most attacks are automated, and most are repeated. If a webmaster removes the malicious injected code but fails to close the original security hole, the site will probably get hacked again within hours or days.

 

Yeah just contact google after you have removed any malicious code and they will review you for reinclusion.

Good Luck

 

Just found this article on the official Google Webmaster Central blog: Hey Google, I no longer have badware

Here is the part that might be interesting to you:

 

see, this is what angers me about google, they have their googlebots, why don't they do the crawling and fix the problems themselves??? it shouldn't be up to the poor webmaster that might not even know to have to manually tell them all this, they should keep checking back and if a site is fixed and clean then unpenalize it

there are so many sites out there that have unfair penalties on them that seem to last a long long time, it is really unfair of google

 

Same like you before 1 week my two sites (based on ASP.net) got hacked. And I mentioned that Google dropped my SERP rank to 2-3 positions. Though now gradually I am getting my rank back

I do agree with you. You are absolutely right.

No, now Google takes only 6 hours after you submit form for reinclusion

 

My site is re-included, it never really got taken away, my site only had the 'this site may contain malicious code' warning.

The problem seems to have occured with my search results for say,

Transform windows xp into vista - which used to get me around 100 hits daily, this is now down to 4 or 5, my sites total daily visitors has gone from 500 down to 60, a massive drop which seems to have dropped my serps, not removed me from google!

Either way this drop is costing me around £3 ($6) a day

 

Actually they don't use regular googlebots for malware detection. It's completely different set up. In order to be able to say that particular web page tries to install malicious content they load the web pages in IE with JavaScript enabled and then analize system changes. It's more time consuming task and their security robots are not that fast as googlebots. They spider less sites than googlebots and revisit them very seldom. For many indexed sites you can see the "Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days." message in the safe browsing diagnostics.

That's why they rely on webmasters to let them know when the site has been cleaned and they can recheck it.
Otherwise you migh need to wait for another 90 days or more before the next planned google security bot visit.

 

I advised google as soon as it was cleaned, and their partner (Stopbadware.com I think)

Google have agreed my site is clean but the rankings seem to have been permanantly damaged

I sincerely hope that my rankings return to normal soon, if not I could end up losing a huge amount over this!

 

So, did you send them a reconsideration request explaining what you think was wrong with your site?

Note, it not the malware request you submited when you cleaned the site. (Log in to your Webmaster Tools account. Under Tools, click on "Request reconsideration")

 

Hey bro, Dont worry your site will get its past SERP soon. It may take near about 1-2 months to get back your position.

 

My server was hacked 2.5 years ago, and they used a script to change every html page on the server.
With more than 8k pages it took me forever to change back, my domains never recovered in google after numerous attempt.

I have now a new server and new domains, starting from scratch.
I don't know exactly the numbers I lost, but several 100k

Hate hackers

 

That is insane--what kind of site?