My web has been hacked: How does it affect SEO and what should I do?

When a website has been hacked, it begins to lose its SEO positioning according to the activities that the attackers perform inside the site. It is important to detect the infection in time, clean it and then force Google to return to tracking the cleaned content.

In general, hacked websites are infected with malware, which causes thousands of new URLs to be generated that point to pages created by viruses. With the cleaning of files we can make those URLs stop working, but it will also be necessary to check if the links are indexed in Google, if so, if the malicious URLs must be identified and request its deindexation through the URLS removal tool from Google Search Console.

If you work with an SEO agency, it can do this work for you to avoid getting into trouble, the experts will perform the cleaning, deindexing of infected URLs and the request for a new Google crawl in order to recover the positioning of the website.

Viruses are also capable of introducing links within the web content to SPAM websites. due to being it is important to perform audits of outgoing links with tools such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, as well as manually cleaning all malicious outgoing links.

When performing corrective actions, it is important to work in conjunction with Google Search Console, with the aim of monitoring all links and website activity.

On the other hand, it is also convenient to review if they have generated links from SPAM websites to our website, if so, the most certain thing is that they have been created by the virus to the pages in our infected website. To detect the links with tools, it is recommendable to add said suspicious URLs to Google’s Disavow link disavow file.

In some cases, depending on the damage that the malware has achieved, it could cost a lot of work to disinfect the web and recover the position previously obtained, but it is not impossible, especially if you use the services of some agency, because the experts are used to dealing with this type of problems

If your website is not infected with a virus, it does not mean that it is safe, even if you have good practices and take all precautions, the threats evolve every day, because hackers are always trying to find vulnerabilities or new forms of exploitation to be able to attack websites

Because of this, it is necessary to perform scans with antivirus tools, generally, hosting providers have these tools and make them available to the user through their control panel. In addition, there are providers that perform automatic scans for their account, with the aim of protecting their servers in case of an infection.

In addition, it is always necessary to be careful with the files stored in the web hosting, scan the images and other files below to avoid infecting the entire website, avoid inserting links to unknown websites, among other actions that can help to avoid a virus infection.

If you have any comments or questions, leave them below.

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