Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
New here.. a friend of mine has an ecommerce site that was being attacked. The site root was in fact domain.com/store/. He had no idea how to handle the attack so he changed it to /store2 and then changed the index.php file in /store to do a 3 second redirect to /store2 then also put a htaccess redirect to all *.jpg, *.html, *.php files from /store to /store2. This stopped the attacks from having an effect. He left it this way for 3 days before I told him he would probably cop a massive SERP slap and should revert it ASAP if they attacks had stopped. He then reverted it back to it's original directory structure.
About a week later the site lost all PR (previously PR3). This was 2 weeks ago and it is yet to recover.
It slowly regained ranking for a few minor search terms but is still not recovering for all it's more competitve search terms.
If anyone can give me some advice on what's happened and if any real damage has been done I would very much appreciate it :)
The fact that some recovery is showing is good. When a site makes sudden major changes and then a bit later reverts, Google often seems to put the domain in a kind of "observation mode" for a while and only gradually trust a return to previous ranking.
In this case, I can understand why the chain of redirects would raise some flags - that is something that, though innocent in this case, could also be the footprint for some kind of attempted manipulation.
This sounds like a good reason for a reconsideration request through a Webmaster Tools account.
