Can an entire server get a penalty?

[doovde]

OK so I have some sites hosted on a reseller account at HostGator and traffic to all of them has just evaporated over the past 7 days.

Can a server get a penalty? which might explain why this has happened?

All of the homepages of the sites in question have disapeared and stopped ranking for their exact match terms of which some have ranked no.1 for for over a year. A general loss of rankings is aparent for all of them.

Is moving one to a new server to see what happens my only chance of working this out?

It seems as if this website aimtrust.com has sent traffic to all of them which is strange. Where it says Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) in awstats this appears in all the logs.

I did get hacked about a month ago but a fresh install of wordpres seemed to solve all problems and last month traffic was normal.

[LadyHoldem]

I think so. But that's my guess. It did seem like all my sites on one server lost all pr at the same time. IDK for certain if it was related.

Another problem I had much earlier on with hostgator that you might want to make sure isn't your problem is ..

Their firewall banned google.. 4flush got a surge of traffic, and google was visiting a lot, so the bot got banned and we started quickly dropping out of the index. It took some doing to convince hostgator of the problem and get it fixed.

[doovde]

I'm about at the end with Host Gator - I'm thinking it's much more likely to be a hacking related problem and when my issue first arose they were less than helpful.

Can anyone reccommend a way of moving the sites which insures that no virus/hack can remain?

[Graham]

I don't think Google is that tough because they are aware of shared hosting plans. It probably is related to when you were hacked.

[cernus11]

Try installing WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin to see if you have any problems.

[Ridge]

I'm not sure either, if they are sharing an IP I would say it seems possible. Also, I've never heard anything good about hostgator, always problems. If you want a good dedicated or VPS server, check out ServInt which has just been awesome!

[Michael Martinez]

It would be extremely rare for a search engine to ban a server these days, but the search engines are all concerned about malware. If the server has been compromised they might start dropping its pages.

If you're sharing the server with other users you may not even be able to confirm that the server has been compromised.

You can use the IP: operator at Bing to see how many other sites may be sharing your server. If you see malware warnings beside any of them, that would be a reason for concern.

Otherwise, it might just be that you're seeing pages drop out of the search index for lack of value-passing links. Google, especially, has been waging a huge war on links and recently stepped up its filtering.

Even if you don't do anything Google forbids in link building, if you obtain links from sites that have violated Google's guidelines, then those links may lose value as their backlinks drop out or as they are penalized.

[Chalkie]

Slight derail sorry, however, another guy getting traffic from aimtrust.com

What are these people at, concerning me now!

[doovde]

Try installing WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin to see if you have any problems.

I have tried this but for some reason the plug in won't work.

Slight derail sorry, however, another guy getting traffic from aimtrust.com

I have no idea but they are listed in the logs of about 5 of my sites and considering they are a financial company with nothing to do with gambling it seems very odd.

I am going to manually move one of my sites to a different host today. It's going to take ages but it's the only way I can be sure that I don't take the virus with me.

I will let you know the results Chalkie and if the traffic stops coming from aimtrust.com then I think we can be fairly sure that something dodgey is going on.

Dave

[Chalkie]

Cheers David, i will keep an eye out for your result.

ref the exploit scanner i have tried it on 1 site, it works, trouble is now i have a massive list of problems that i have no idea about.

Blockers, severe, warnings

I have like over 100 of these, now i am worried!