Expected time frame for Google SERPS penalty?

[dba2003]

Our site, with an Alexa ranking of approx 70k. is a 3 years old site wit PR5 and approx 40k backlinks. It has three blogs on content rich subdomains. The site/+subdomains enoys premium SERPS across the board.

Now.... 10 days ago ALL index files on the site had a malicious iframe injection/hack. The injctions lasted for a few hours the first day and then continued at 24 hour intervalls for 2 days (1 hour each time) until we beleive we managed to stop the intrusions.

Just recently ALL SERPS for all domains got tanked to position #100-350 (with the exception of one less competitive keyword still at #1... weired). Site still at PR5.

Importantly, we can see that Google has cached our indexpage JUST at the time of the hack, we therefore suspect the hack to have been the cause of the sudden drop across the domains.

Question: What time frame to expect for a penalty of this kind? Should we contact contact Google mnanually in this matter. Other tips?

Thanks!

[tedster]

Other here have reported time spans of 3 days to a week or two. Yes, it's a wise idea to use your Webmaster Tools account, send a Reconsideration Request and explain exaclt what the problem was and how you fixed it. It can only speed your recovery along.

[soxos]

This does not sound like a manual penalty, therefore I would not personally ask for a reconsideration (just because unless its pure white, I worry they will find something wrong if there isnt already) instead, I would wait a week or two - to let the dust settle. You might find, the next crawl / cache will be clean and your site will be back. If then, your rankings dont return to normal thats is when I would file reconsideration..

[dba2003]

Thanks, I was first unsure if the penalty was even related to the hack, though it seems likely considering the timing. Would such a scenario that I described usually trigger an automated penalty of this magnitude?

Our SEO efforts are very conservative, and I don't feel we have anything to hide, but these days even a couple of social bookmarks on multiple blog posts seem to hold the potential for triggering severe penalties (we don't buy links etc.)

Soxox's advice seems like a safer way to travel.

Thanks.

[extremegolfer]

my son-in-law filed a reconsideration request. In 12 days he was back, but then 2 days ago he suddenly disappeared again. Who knows what google is up to...