Site Down Time

[doovde]

So, I took one of my sites down about two weeks ago to change it's hosting and I've had to manually move it across. This is because the site was hacked and I wanted to be 100% sure that there wasn't a problem with the wordpress installation or SQL database.

Naturally this took me longer than I wanted it to and 2 weeks later I'm ready to go back online.

If you remember a while ago I made this thread: Can an entire server get a penalty?

Well this is one of the affected sites and I'm hoping that the move from the old hosting coupled with the fresh wordpress installation and sql database will bring a return in traffic.

Is this a kind of only time will tell type issue? or do you think the site is doomed?

Dave

[doovde]

The site in question is Online Bingo Halls - it's mostly remained in the google index but a few pages have began dropping out.

[chowner]

did you put any 503 HTTP code while the site was down?

[doovde]

No i didn't

[Michael Martinez]

Build a few new links to help kickstart the crawling the process again and you should be okay.

[doovde]

Build a few new links to help kickstart the crawling the process again and you should be okay.

An update on this situation, it looks like the site has some kind of 5 page penalty. The homepage ranks 5pages lower as does loads of the articles that used to rank well.

Anything I can do?

[addz123]

the server my site is on uk2.net is experiencing massive problems the last week and my site's been on and offline last couple of days. pissing me off now.

[Michael Martinez]

Search engines don't penalize sites for changing hosts. If you have a penalty, there is another reason for that penalty and you need to look for THAT reason.

[doovde]

Here's a timeline:

Novemeber 09 - site gets hacked and remains in hacked state for 36 hours
- site back online traffic seemingly normal

December 09 - significant drop in traffic across site in question and other sites hosted on shared server
- site taken offline, other affected sites remain online

January 10 - site is moved hosts manually after being offline around 20 days, new wordpress instillation, clean version of theme installed.

The only connection I can make here is between the sites which remain online and the current state of the site in question. The sites which remain online have recieved sporadic google traffic but virtually none, strangely traffic from google images hasn't died like regular search traffic has. Traffic on site in question seems completely gone although the site remains in the index and does appear many pages back from its usual rankings this is happening with the sites that remain online on the old server as well.

Given the above I thought seperating the sites might make a differance. Either the other sites were affected by this site or this site was affecting the other sites. Moving it hasn't suggested this to be the case.

I have not done the same link building for all affected sites. Some of the link building done on other sites on the old server could be considered spammy I think. There are no spammy links to the site I've moved as far as I know, none show up in any backlink checkers either.

On the site in question I have done around 25 link exchanges, some via a resource page and some incontent ones. I also wrote quite a lot of content and distributed it freely to webmasters on PAL in exchange for a link. I built links to the homepage mostly but also to about five other pages.

All links to the homepage are using the anchor text 'Online Bingo Halls' maybe that looks a little dodgey?!

None of the sites on the old server link to the moved site.

The only thing I can think of is the link exchanges I've done. I looked through all the inbound links listed in backlinkwatch and all those sites seem to be penalty free. I checked yahoo in links which is showing 0 at the moment. Not sure why this is? maybe to do with the site being down? I also checked the sites listed in the Domain-Pop backlink checker and can't find anything to crazy apart from this site which doesnt seem to link to me anymore:

ptcomsp.spezianet.it

I'll keep looking but at the moment I'm kinda stumped baring the fact google thinks I've abused link exchanges.

[Michael Martinez]

When you moved the site, did you download the files from the hacked server and upload them to the new server, or did you upload them from a secure backup?

Does Google show a malware warning for any of the sites either in its SERPs or in its Chrome browser?

Although Google recently announced a very aggressive policy toward spammy linking practices, unless you're dropping links in blog comments and forums it seems unlikely you would have tripped that kind of penalty (but I cannot rule it out, especially based on a just a forum discussion).

It might be that a reinclusion request is in order. I have heard that if the situation is resolved Google MAY reply and let you know "all is okay". Supposedly, if they say nothing then there may still be a penalty (but this is all hearsay -- I don't know exactly when or why Google responds to these requests).

If you have a significant number of Websites that use spammy tactics then where they are hosted doesn't matter if Google can connect them all to you -- they will be very skeptical about trusting even totally clean sites from people they deem to be repeat spammers.