How Does Google Deal With Hacked Websites?

It's the worst nightmare of every webmaster, your site gets hacked. That's really bad for you as a webmaster but also for your search engine rankings. But Google can help you get back in the high search engine results pages again.

A couple of months ago Matt Cutts told us on his blog about how Google handles hacked websites. But I've had my own experiences with Google and a couple of hacked websites of mine. I'm going to tell you first hand how Google handled my hacked websites a few months back.

In early may there was some kind of backdoor in the shared server of my hosting company. Because of this backdoor a javascript changed all the index pages of every website on the server. There were placed hidden links on every index page of every website on the server.

This also happened to my websites, and I didn't even noticed it. Until one of my websites disappeared from the first spot on Google. Okay, this happens all the time, but this website had a steady number one position for about one and a half year without ever dropping one place. And from one day to the other the listig was gone. So I figured it could be some onpage optimization issues, maybe even a penalty. So I went looking for the problem in the source code of my website, and what I saw there were hundreds of hidden links to, mostly, bad neighbourhood websites.

I immediatly deleted the links and uploaded the clean index again. But half an hour later the hidden links were back on the index page. It took the hosting about a week to find the backdoor. But I CHMODded a clean index page to "nobody can change". It worked! The pages didn't change anymore! This was three days after the penalty. I went for a vacation for a week and when I was back, I was at my number one spot in Google again!

So what's the big lesson behind this story? The big lesson is that Google probably places your website in some kind of quarantine if they find a black hat technique on your website. Maybe this is a period of about 10 days or a week. And after that period they check if the problem is still there. If it is you get a 30 day penalty or more and you will have to wait for the end of that period before you get back into the index again. I think this is a very good system from Google, to be placed in quarantine before you get completely banned.