Unable to Get Back to Performance Levels Six Months After Attack

[designgroop]

We work on a fine art site. In May we were attacked and blocked by Google for about 12hrs until we cleared all affected pages and files. Our response was pretty fast, and to be fair, so was Google's action to unblock us.

However, shortly afterwards, the entire site's page rank disappeared, it never came back. I also believe people are now speculating that Google's PR updates are either overdue or have stopped, so I can't gauge PR at all.

One way we can gauge potential for position is that we remain top 1-6 in Bing for most terms. Moz authority reflects this as well. An example:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=doug+hyde+prints&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt=all&pq=doug+hyde+prints&sc=6-15&sp=-1&sk=

https://www.google.co.uk/search?rls=en&q=doug+hyde+prints

These are the types of position we occupied on Google prior to the drop. We've been told there are no manual actions against us, nevertheless we've worked to clean out any duplicate content and disavow some link trawling/people directory sites that duplicated a lot of our content. Page code has been cleaned up, pages optimised, loading times reduced where possible etc. etc..

This chap seems to have had similar issues back in 2011: http://moz.com/community/q/not-ranking-well-after-site-was-hacked

Any input/experience gratefully received. Working our wotsits off to generate traffic off no PR and Adwords at the moment and it's a struggle. I've actually got new sites to rank faster and better than this in 3 months, so this is one big penalty.

Roland

[Cyrus-Shepard]

A few points.

1. Make absolute sure your site is clear of Malware. Check Google Webmaster Tools and I also recommend running your URL through the Securi checker  (the scan is free, and the service is worth it if you were hit)

http://sucuri.net/

2. After a malware hit, Google recommends you use the "Crawl as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools and then select "Submit this page and all linked pages to Index" option.

3. Make sure your sitemaps are up to date and properly submitted via Google Webmaster Tools.

4. I did notice in your question that you disavowed links. If you disavowed links that were actually helping you this could have had a negative effect on your rankings. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to get these back.

It's possible your drop has nothing to do with the Malware - it could be just an unfortunate coincidence. Do a site audit, check your crawl errors, try to match your traffic drop against known Google updates, and stay vigilant about improving your content and outreach.

No definite answers here, but I hope this background helps. Best of luck with your site!