I've lost all my Google rankings

[josh01]

On New Years Eve my hosting company was hacked and all sites hosted with them went down until it was resolved yesterday. Since then I have lost all rankings on the first page of google for my 2 sites affected. I have other sites hosted elsewhere and they have not experienced any loss of rankings in Google, so am 99.9% sure it is down to this hosting problem.

My question is, how long will it take to get my rankings back, and has any permanent damage has been done?

btw - the hosting company in question wa sNamehog if you want to stay clear of them.

[pokerente]

I once invested around 3K into SEO for a brutal ranking site. Hosting made wrong DNS configuration, servers went down, I dropped from place 1 for absolute murder-keywords to under 100 and never came back... However, I dont wanna scare you

[mobilejackpots]

I feel for you, it can be a real headache when something like this happens.

So the whole site was down for about 5 days? There's no strict rule on what to do in this situation, but I would:

- If not already done, register the site with Google Webmaster Tools. Submit an xml sitemap.
- Add 5 new pages of content to your site and do some major social bookmarking for each url.
- If your site is over 9 months old, buy some links. Buy a 2 or 3 blog posts, submit to a couple of bidding directories, buy 1 sitewide link. If you are against buying links you can arrange link exchanges or new links from your other sites.

Google doesn't intentionally want to punish your site for a one off hosting issue. It's just about letting the spider know that your site is back and functional.

[ck8795]

Is it the sites in your sig? I still see two ranking (FYI you've got an include error on your free bets site and a bunch of content with nofollowed links <-- not sure if that's intentional or not)

@mobile's advice - buying links when your site drops is the last thing you should do. Your just adding to your problems if it doesn't resolve because you won't know whether the hosting issue, a link buy or something unrelated to the two caused the problem. I wouldn't change/add anything till you've figured it out.

Edit - Since its only been a couple days - I would wait and see what happens. Just carry on as normal. It should fix itself.

[mobilejackpots]

Is it the sites in your sig? I still see all three ranking

@mobile's advice - buying links when your site drops is the last thing you should do. Your just adding to your problems if it doesn't resolve because you won't know whether the hosting issue, a link buy or something unrelated to the two caused the problem. I wouldn't change/add anything till you've figured it out.

Yes I agree that buying links should always be done with caution. But I was assuming the reason for the sites drop in rankings is the hosting issue. My general message is get more links, it can be in whatever way you like. Article marketing etc.

[learn2holdem]

Imo it should come back once the crawlers see the content is back.

Especially as this was fast so they did not have time to infect everything with spammy links, in other words it did not become a bad neighborhood (yet); --> no penalty.

[josh01]

Kaus - only one of the sites affected was in my sig - the Free Bets one you pointed out. I have now resolved the issue of the missing .inc file.

I've now noticed it's only my homepage that appears to have lost rankings, I still have some page 1 rankings for longer tail searches that my internal pages rank for. Hopefully that is a good sign.

[unclebada]

It should come back up in a few days once hosting gets back up and running.

Once search engines crawlers finds everything again and "normal" your site should be back, just follow #learn2holdem and #mobilejackpots instructions to get the additional juice in case the ranking is not quite the same.

good luck!

[Simmo!]

It wouldn't do any harm to submit a reinclusion request to Google too, explaining exactly what happened. Don't say you lost your rankings and want them back lol, just that you think it may potentially have triggered a penalty. Google do tend to look at all reinclusion requests (eventually).

[jctroy440]

I hosed down my own site several weeks ago "experimenting" (won't do that anymore) and was down for two days. Didn't affect anything. you may have a deeper problem your not aware of.

You may want to send a request for reconsideration from Google Webmaster dashboard and see if they can fix it from inside.

[josh01]

I am not sure a re-inclusion is required, as I still have lots of ranking for my sites internal pages, just not for my homepage.

[josh01]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I added a load of content over the weekend to one of the sites and it has got the vast majority of rankings back. Am in the process of doing the same for the other site which will hopefully have the same effect.

[Murton]

Josh,

If your sites were cached when down then yes, this would be the case although some sites do get cached when down but don't get affected at all.

Please email me or add me on Skype and I will be more than happy to help you gain all your rankings back as a nice gesture of course

[iadanza]

It will take around 1-2 months to overcome the situation. Also you can file Google reconsideration asking for previuos ranking.

You can find the option at Google webmaster tools.

[JoeAdams]

<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title></title><meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 3.2 (Win32)"><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> To get your Google rankings back, also consider doing some high quality back links and contents as it is some of the great factors that Google considers in ranking.

[cassy]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I added a load of content over the weekend to one of the sites and it has got the vast majority of rankings back. Am in the process of doing the same for the other site which will hopefully have the same effect.

<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title></title><meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 3.1 (Win32)"><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> Unique and informative content will always be a good start to get back your rankings. As you have tested with your other sites, it made your site ranks. You can add news content for an interesting read.

[meaganandersen]

On New Years Eve my hosting company was hacked and all sites hosted with them went down until it was resolved yesterday. Since then I have lost all rankings on the first page of google for my 2 sites affected. I have other sites hosted elsewhere and they have not experienced any loss of rankings in Google, so am 99.9% sure it is down to this hosting problem.

My question is, how long will it take to get my rankings back, and has any permanent damage has been done?

btw - the hosting company in question wa sNamehog if you want to stay clear of them.

Well you can't blame Google if they do have some issues about hosting problems since they aim to provide users with the best website for that particular keyword.