An SEO consultant posted on LinkedIn that one of his websites saw a 50% decline in traffic in a two week period. This was due to the site being hacked, content being injected and Google indexing that hacked content, leading to the site not ranking well in Google Search anymore.
He wrote:
Our website just suffered a massive traffic drop — from 2,000+ daily visits to about 1,100 — almost 50% wiped out in just two weeks, and it's still going down as I write this post.The source: a hack that injected over 210,000 fake product pages, all indexed by Google and interlinked across several other compromised sites.
He shared this chart that showed the huge decline in organic search traffic in that short period of time:
He added that he was able to clean up the hack, removed the injected files and 404/410ed the hacked pages and did all the things you'd do when this would happen. But he was disappointed, that "the traffic decline continues and recovery feels uncertain," he wrote. "The cleanups were done almost 2 weeks ago, I'm still waiting to see the graph going back up," he later added.
John Mueller from Google responded saying, "These kinds of hacks can take a bit of time to settle back down (which is one reason you should always be on top of things in terms of updates & security)." So it will take time for the site to recover.
Another thing John Mueller noticed was that traffic from other sources, like direct traffic, social, and other channels outside of Google was not that strong. So John recommended bolstering that to take a "bit out of" the hack situation. He wrote:
One way you can also take the bite out of situations like these (looking at your specific traffic graph in the post) is to build up other traffic channels - for example, to encourage people to come (back) to your site on their own.
Being hacked is really not fun and most SEOs who have experience have dealt with these over their years. But sometimes you don't control the security on the server and you have to deal with the situations. Time heals but it is uncertain if there will be long-term damage caused by a hack or not. Hopefully things bounce back slowly and fully.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
