Hackers Managed To Destroy Our Rankings Options

[paintyourlife]

Hi Jill and everyone,

I'm having a real crisis:

about 3 weeks ago, hackers have managed to put some folders and files on my server (where our site is) and linked to them from sites like:

[urls removed]

and others...

I have all the files that were planted on my server, but Google has managed to index them before I managed to delete them.

The outcome of all this mess is that Google is now confused about what my website is about, and I lost most of my rankings.

This is what Google webmaster shows for [my site] :

Below are the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site.
1. nude
2. products
3. news
4. family
5. gallery
6. copyright
7. afghanistan
8. porn
9. company
10. contacts
11. designed
12. portraits
13. video
14. painting

I thought that since I deleted those files, and I waited 3 weeks, things will get back to normal but they don't.

Any idea of what I can do?

How can I tell Google to ignore all those porn links to my site?

Thanks a lot for any help,

Assaf

Reason for edit: URLs removed

[rolf]

That's a nasty trick, hope you manage to get it sorted.

[Randy]

If you're sure you got all of the hacked files removed, not just new files but any other files that may reference something it shouldn't be, and that your server now delivers a 404 Not Found as it should for those removed files, you'd done about all you can do.

Links pointing from those other places shouldn't hurt you. In fact, if they're pointing as non-existent files they should be doing exactly nothing. Other than filling up your error logs.

[portentint]

You can't file a reinclusion request, technically, because you haven't been banned or penalized.

You CAN make sure you have a current XML sitemap, and that it's set up in Webmaster Tools.

And, one final brainstorm: You could set up robots.txt to exclude those pages from being crawled. Not sure if that'd be better than a 404, but it's worth a shot.

[Jill]

Also be sure the hackers haven't hidden stuff some place or are reinjecting their bad stuff.

Check lots of your pages via Google's text cache to see if there are still hidden bad words/links on some pages.

[SERPico]

You can also use Google Alerts to see if your site has any of the most popular spam words hidden in your content.

[paintyourlife]

Thanks all of you guys for your tips.

Although I have deleted those folders, I have disallowed them now in robots.txt all those new folders as portentin has suggested.

I'll try and implement the other tips that you guys wrote and will let you know if anything changes...

Thanks again,

Assaf

[Randy]

You may also be able to shortcut it a bit by using a site:yourdomain.com type of search over at Google, with your domain name followed by some of the words they stuck up on those pages. This should tell you if Google still has any of those pages indexed or if anything was missed in the cleanup process.