Sergey Lorens

For me, as well as for many other internet marketers and SEO optimizers, losing all your search engine positions overnight is probably the biggest nightmare you could face. I do not have words to describe how I felt when this nightmare became reality and the search engine position of my top money making website fell from number three to 400 in the rankings overnight. It took me more than a month to restore them to where they were again and in this post I will explain to you what caused such demise and how I eventually fixed it.

On September 7th I went abroad for a week. I didn’t take my laptop with me because I wanted to spend a week sunbathing and drinking cocktails on the beach. While I was abroad, my position checking tool was monitoring my websites positions every day so I could check them when I got back. On September 14th I finally returned home. I checked the positions of some of my websites and they were fine, but when I saw the position of my top money making website, the one that I had been working on for more than two years, drop by 360 places, I was shocked. The website’s traffic, and hence income, decreased by almost 80 percent.

I guessed that Google had updated their algorithm, so I immediately checked some reputable search engine optimization forums looking for any information on this update. However, I didn’t find anything on this topic at all. The problem was with something else. I always keep logs and write down each action I take with all my websites. I checked these logs trying to understand what I did wrong and what caused such a fall, however the only thing I had done with the website before my trip was add a new image.

Finally, I decided to check the logs and the source code of the website and found out that somehow there were some hidden links to “adult” websites added, that were full of spyware and viruses. Someone had hacked my website! I am absolutely sure that it was one of my competitors because the keywords I had dominated were very competitive and profitable. Their goal was not to promote those crap url’s they posted on my site, but to harm my website and make it lose its position in the SERPS. Well, they certainly achieved what they set out to do…

I immediately started trying to resolve the situation:

• I deleted all of the hidden links and set a new password.
• Then I slightly altered the content on my home page and added five more pages of new content, bookmarked them and placed links to the new pages from some of my old relevant websites.
• The next step was to start posting blog comments. At that moment I had about 6000 incoming links and my website was more than two years old, so I did not worry about the quantity of links I was adding per day so posted more than 30 blog comments each day during the next week.

The fluctuations continued until October 20th. Then my websites ranking skyrocketed to number three in the rankings and remained there until October 27th when my website again dropped to four hundred! However, the next day it was back up to number three again.

To sum up I would like to say that almost four months have passed since my website was hacked. My website has already restored its former position for the main keywords but they still fluctuate and are not as stable as they used to be. I did not know for sure what would happen If I only deleted the hidden links; some people might have thought that that was enough but for my part, I thought it was worth increasing the quantity of incoming links in the first instance and if something similar happens to me in the future, I will follow the same procedure I did with this website.

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