Surviving the three worst website disasters can be painless- if you act quickly. Let’s look at them individually, together with the remedy, and a plan to get you up and running as quickly as possible, with minimum downtime, and ideally no disruption to your business. And what would the effect be on all your hard earned seo results?
Here’s where you stand.
A Hacked Website- The Effect on Your SEO Efforts
You wake up early one morning to find that your website has been hacked. Whether it’s by someone calling themselves Q8 Coder or some unidentified soul, clearly, as of this moment on your website looks totally different to how it did yesterday. While you should be worrying about the impression of all this upon your website visitor- your attention should also be on Google- the robot and indexing.
If you have done all the right things- and engaged us to manage your SEO, you will have gained some valuable rank by now and if you don’t move quickly, your website rank will take a dive.
Contact us- or your web developer and put it right. Common hacks are a “Hacked by Q8-coder” index page, a blind redirect of some or all of your traffic to a different url- whether a blanket redirect, or stealing your search engine driven traffic- you’re still losing valuable traffic that has cost you money to acquire. Worse still is a total destruction of your site- and we emphasise here- if you are quick off the mark- if you respond soon- we can even restore from “no website left at all” if you move quickly.
The htaccess Redirect- Stealing All or Some of Your Website Traffic
A hacker can rewrite your .htaccess file and steal by redirection some or all of your website visitors. This means your visitor thinks they are visiting yoursite.com and instead get forced to visit somewhereelse.com at the direction of the hacker. From an seo perspective this is bad because your website is serving up different content to the visitor- and to Googlebot- than what each is expecting. At best your ranking will plummet, at worse- and most likely- your domain will get blacklisted.
This Website Contains Malware That May Harm Your Computer
This warning appears in Google’s listing of your site- and I can tell you from experience in dealing with clients’ sites that have had this curse- your traffic drops to zero. You need to move quickly on this- in Australia it could result in a notification from the Attorney-General’s Department. If you move quickly, and your website is still online, Google won’t penalise you, especially if you don’t host the malware- it may just be the your links point to a suspect site. Either way, expect your visitors to stay away. When all has been made good, a simple reconsideration request direct to Google can result in the warning being lifted after a manual review of your site. This can take up to 48 hours to happen.