Hacked website - recovering from Google SEO perspective?

[realmaverick]

I need some urgent advice.

My biggest website, with over 2 million members, has just been hacked. To the nth degree. They somehow gained access to the root, they wiped the lot.

I'm still not clear how, but they then gained access to the backup servers and completely wiped them too. We're trying to find out if there's anything we can salvage.

The system was custom coded and was constantly developed, we've lost 10's if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of work and obviously the lost revenues.

I have a passionate team, who don't want to give up. I personally feel demoralised and don't really want to start again, as I can't even begin to imagine how.

If nothing can be salvaged and we did start over, what would be the best way to start over? We had hundreds of thousands of pages, my head is just completely fuzzy.

Any advice from an SEO perspective would be great.

Thanks a lot.

[TheMadScientist]

The URL needs to stay the same for search engine purposes and page request tracking to start build a URL list, etc ... That's what the example I gave does.

The line of Mod_Rewrite tells the server to get the page /serve-503-error.php and serve it to any URL a visitor requests. You definitely Do Not want to redirect anything anywhere or you'll likely just be causing more issues down the road.

Basically, you want to keep any visitor on the URL they requested and 'take the information to the visitor' (rewrite) rather than moving the visitor to a different URL or 'taking the visitor to the information' (redirect).

[phranque]

RewriteRule .? /serve-503-error.php [L] 

specifically about the RewriteRule directive when used for an internal rewrite (in your case) versus an external redirect:
- do not include the protocol or hostname in the target URL or it will become an external redirect.
- if the [R] flag is used it is an external redirect.

[realmaverick]

Hey guys, we've battled for a month, working long hours, to get a usable website back online and we're due to launch it in a week.

Unfortunately during this time, all of the pages, including the homepage, have been de-indexed.

I've no experience with this and I'm not sure what implications this has on the future. Once the new website is online and new pages start getting created, are these pages likely to get indexed? We planned on re-creating the main traffic pages, again, do we stand any chance of them a) getting indexed and b) ranking again.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks

[tedster]

Yes, you certainly can be indexed and ranking again. If you essentially regenerated the previous site, then it can be just a few days. Unfortunately, I know this from experience, because I recently had an 1800 page site hacked with malware. We were online again from a secure backup in about 4 days - and it only took that long because of an uncooperative hosting service and we needed to move. Still, we had our old Google traffic back two days later.

If you come back online with something different than the website you used to have, then I think it could be a much longer haul.

[rowtc2]

I suggest to insist in recovering deleted data from hdd, search a specialized firm and ask at the brand who produces the hdd.