: What effect does a website defacing have on ranking? A new client is asking me to improve his website's ranking. he says his former SEO expert is claiming that because his site was defaced

@Kaufman445

Here is my answer based on the reply to my comment that you provided.


Scan the website through Securi and check that everything has been fully cleaned up now and it is safe for visitors to use.
Check Google Webmaster Tools for any warnings or messages to see if they have caught wind of the seriousness of any issues (hacking/malware/unnatural links).
Check the backlink profile with a tool such as ahrefs to ensure there have been no harmful inbound links built to the website as part of the hacking.
Make sure the website is still fully indexed in Google using the site operator (site:domain.com).
Providing all the above steps tick the boxes, then creating great content on the website will get Google re-crawling the website and it will be possible to improve the organic search rankings with the correct methodology and practices (i.e correctly built and structured website that provides great content that the intended audience want).

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@Courtney195

Site rankings build up only slowly over a period of couple of months. Change the site and rankings should build up then.

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