More than 450 Pages Created by a hacker

[VeroBrain]

Hi Moz Community,

I am in charge of the Spanish SEO for an international company, related to security. A couple of months ago, I realized that my Spanish/keywords/post all vanished from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duckduckgo.

Then I noticed that somebody in command of the main website used a disavow all!

I was in shock, as all of you can imagine. Knowing that all the inbound links were spam score under 4, highly relevant and so.

Later on, I was informed that the website was hacked and somebody took that action. Of course, it did not solved the issue.

I continue researching and found those pages - "Online%20Games%20-%20Should%20Parents%20Worry%20Or%20Celebrate%3F" - all of them like this one.

I informed the owner of the website - he is not my client - my client is the Spanish Manager. They erased the pages, of course plus sent all those, to avoid the 404 responses, to the homepage with a 301.

My heart stopped at that point!

I asked them to send all those with a redirect 301 to a new hidden page with nofollow and noindex directives.

We recover, my keywords/pages are in the first page again. Although the DA fell 7 points and no inbound links for now. I asked for the disavow file "to rewrite it", not received yet.

Any better ideas? Encountered a similar issue? How did you solved it?
Thanks in advance.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Firstly it seems like you did all the right steps to resolve the issue. A while back I had a similar issue with my site and later a client's site that got hacked. They were both WordPress sites so now always recommend Wordfence plugin (premium) to stop the hack in the first place.

I wouldn't worry too much about the drop in DA, DA goes up and down all the time - it's only relative to your competitors. If your competitors go up and you go down that's when I would worry.

You are right in wanting the disavow file - its needs an audit and updating. I would just keep chasing and explaining you are potentially losing revenue and profit (they probably don't get the impact of rankings, but if you explain it in something which they do they will respond quicker). Once you have the file it's up to you to audit and amend as necessary, but this won't affect your Moz DA.

I would also ask them what processes they have put in place to stop getting hacked again if your doing all this work and the client hasn't changed how they operate, it could be a lot of time spent for nothing.

Thanks

Andy

[VeroBrain]

Hi Andy,

Thank you very much for sharing your experience with the issue.
I will do as you said, asking for a standard related to communication. Sadly, as far as I know, at the other side of the line there is plenty of developers, although without no comprehension of SEO.
Despite that, it is a pleasure to work for a very technical niche and my client is fully supportive. Also, it helps to develop a quick thinking regarding SEO technical issues; which is not my field of expertise.
I shall share your advice about the Wordfence plugin premium.
Thanks again. All the best,

Mª Verónica B.