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Google Penalty –Hacked

Have you ever noticed Google’s “This website may be hacked” advisory under a website listed in their search result? Well, maybe not, since most of the affected websites are tanked in the rankings within a few days of discovery. The point is, Google is capable of detecting websites that are hacked, and they flagged almost half (46.5%) of such websites.

Hackers are always looking for websites which they can exploit, either by injecting malware or by adding links to their other ‘money’ websites. Even worse, they might be trying to steal customers’ personal and payment information. Hacked websites are dangerous for visitors, which is why Google understandably try to prevent their users from visiting them by placing a penalty.

Secure your website to lessen their appeal to professional hackers. Image courtesy of Pixabay

Impact on hacked websites

Once your website has been flagged and penalised by Google, your traffic will instantly nosedive as your spiral down the search rankings. At times, your website could even be entirely excluded from search results. In one survey, 45% of respondents claimed that the level of traffic to their website never returned to normal even after resolving the issue. This means, even though you can get any hacked penalty removed by Google, things will never be the same – so spend time securing your website now.

Fixing a Google hacked penalty

Forget about Google for a second. The first thing you need to do is to regain control of your website. Contact your webhosting provider and domain registrar to secure control and ownership of the website first.

Once you’ve done so, quarantine the website to prevent anything and anyone else from being affected.

If necessary, engage an expert SEO agency to help. Otherwise, perform an audit of the site to find out the type and extent of the hack. Use anti-virus software to clean and sanitise the website. Fix the vulnerability which led to the hack.

Once you’ve completed the remedial process, you may file a reconsideration request with Google.

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