Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash

[georgetsn]

Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc.

Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored.

We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future.

The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem.

Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress,

Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%.

The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend.

We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools.

The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease.

Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?

[DirkC]

Hi,

If you still find errors in WMT I would do a full site crawl with screaming frog to be sure that no errors remain.
Apart from that, I fear you will have to be patient & hope for the best. One of our sites was hacked (2times in a 3 month period) - we lost about 30% of search traffic, and it took us about 3 months to recover (we fully recovered, but we were in a pretty specific niche, with a lot of long tail searches and not that much competition)

rgds,

Dirk

[Kapelski]

It sounds like you may already know this, but other people reading this post for advice may not.  Don't forget to make sure Google didn't take any manual actions against the website when it was compromised. You can do by checking Google WMT under "Search Traffic" -> "Manual Actions". If Google did impose a manual action you will need to submit a reconsideration request to Google. These requests can take 2-3 weeks to process. I hope that helps!