Site was hacked - do I need to change my phone number?

[OptimizationMegan]

The site I was leasing was hacked about a year ago. I've bought a new domain and changed everything about the site. It is completely separated from the old domain. However, my current phone number is still visible on the old site and I can't get it down. I really don't want to get a new phone number, but the SEO success of my new site is extremely important.

Is there anyway the fact that my old phone number on the hacked site could hurt my new site's standing in Google?

Thank you so much!

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Yes I would defiantly get a new number, but if you can afford to keep your old number as some of your old customers / contacts may try and contact you on it - if you can just purchase a number to divert you to your old number this would be do.

On your new website you don't want Google to take the chance of linking the two businesses as I am assuming they will be doing a lot of black hat SEO and use the domain as a churn and burn site - if as you say SEO success of your new site is important don't take the risk of getting linked to your old domain by 1 telephone number.

Its not a huge amount to spend on a new number, but could stop you being penalised by Google, which could cost you more in the long run.

[MiriamEllis]

This is a real toughie! If this is a local business, then I'm guessing that you are concerned about the ramifications of getting a new phone number and then having two numbers associated with your core business NAP (name, address, phone). You would be right to be concerned about this, as no local business should have more than one local phone number floating around the citation ecosystem. This is just Local SEO 101. Horse sense would indicate keeping your original number ... but ... I do feel concerned about the negative effects of having that number on a hacked website that may/may not also contain other references to parts of your business NAP, too.

I'm trying to weigh this on a risk/benefit scale. Without fully understanding all of the details of what is present on the hacked site, it's hard to give good advice here. What I will do is call on one of our traditional SEO experts to chime in here regarding the negative impact of your number being listed on a hacked site that used to belong to you. If this was some third party site, like a business directory, and it got hacked, I don't believe Google would fault you for having been listed there, provided all of your other citations were in good, consistent shape. But we're not talking about a third party site; we're talking about a website which I'm guessing features content about your business on it, right? So, things become grey here.

And, the confusion also stretches into the alternative solution of starting with a completely new number and cleaning up all of your citations to reflect this new number. If there is content about your business, your business name, phone number or address on the hacked website, and you can't clean it up, then this means that it will be acting as a bad citation for whatever new you're trying to build. Again, if this was a single third party directory you just couldn't clean up, I wouldn't be that worried. Provided most of your citations are consistent, you're generally okay. But this is a website that belonged to you - presumably perceived as being authoritative about your business.

So, I guess I'm a bit stumped. Let's see what one of our traditional SEOs will say!

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, like Miriam, I feel like I'm not understanding some key aspects of this situation. Why is the old site still live. How different is the new site? How is the old site being used?

My bigger concern, from a traditional SEO standpoint, would be that the old site might have pages/assets/etc. that are duplicates and could harm content on the new site. It's hard for me to see how the new site could be completely different and still be the same core business, honestly. In terms of the phone number, though, I don't think Google really associates that with any kind of spam or malware signal. The fact that the phone number is on another site probably isn't going to harm your new site, in a core SEO sense.

If the owners of the old domain started to generally make trouble and try to ruin your reputation, then having people connect the number to you wouldn't be great. Again, I'm not clear on how bad the situation is. It's remotely possible Google could use the phone number to connect the sites, in the sense of seeing them as owned by the same people, but I think that's far-fetched. That would probably only come into play with something like a link network.

So, short answer is that I think the risk is small, but I hesitate to say that decisively without knowing more.