Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking

[FPK]

A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time.

Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?

[MarieHaynes]

It's hard to say without knowing the URL, but my guess is that this drop is not because of the hacking unless somehow you made some errors in instituting redirects or disavowed some good links. Still, it would be a bit odd for you to only be noticing the drop now.

Although Google's always changing the algorithm, there have been some relatively big changes this week that have caused a number of sites to drop. We don't really have specifics to chase, but in most cases now when an algo change causes a drop it's due to on-site quality.

With that said, if your homepage dropped out of Google maps as well as organic search there may be a technical issue with your site. Make absolutely sure that it hasn't been noindexed or blocked by robots.txt. Also, have you added any new plugins or tools to the site? Sometimes those can accidentally noindex a page.

If you do a site:yoursite.com search, does the home page appear anywhere?

[FPK]

Your right. I don't feel it's an error with redirects and disavowed links since the homepage is accessible nor is it being blocked by robots.txt. or not being indexed.

Besides minor website content updates none of which was done to the homepage the only change that has been done is that I disabled and removed several unused plugins that are no longer being utilized on the website.

Doing a site:yoursite.com search does not list the homepage. Only the inner pages.

[MarieHaynes]

OK, so if your homepage is completely deindexed, then there has to be a technical issue or a manual penalty. I'd say that a technical issue is much more likely.

To look for a manual penalty, go to Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.

If there is nothing there, then I'm happy to take a quick look if you want to PM me the url or better yet, send me an email at marie at marie haynes dot com.