Traffic drop since April 2013 massive Wordpress attack

2 replies
  • SEO
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Hi,

My site is experiencing a traffic drop since april 2013, the date matches with the massive botnet atack against wordpress that took place in that month:

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet | Ars Technica

WordPress hit by massive botnet: Worse to come, experts warn | ZDNet

I have detected at least 8 spammy/hacked sites pointing links to me from scraped posts published in April 2013.

I made a disavow several weeks ago but nothing happens, the traffic keeps droping. Is there a way to know if my site is infected in some way so that's the reason of the penalty? My code is clean and ther is no spammy outgoing links from my site, so I'm quite sure I am not hacked...
#2013 #april #attack #drop #massive #traffic #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Unless your site was hacked the botnet attack has probably nothing to do with it. The botnet attack was about breaking in, not grabbing content to post somewhere else. Of course I can't be 100% certain of all the motives, but I fail to see how backlinks would benefit the attackers.

    If the site was hacked - well, Google is dropping sites that have nasty code, or just advising people to not go there. My most recent WP hack cleanup was to get rid of sneaky link spam code that the site owners didn't catch at all. They were wondering why their site wasn't visible in Google SERPs, though.

    What's your site URL?

    Wordfence is an easy-to-use security scanner plugin. It's good, but it doesn't catch everything. You could also try Sucuri's free scan.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    As per the above reply, but here's a few thoughts for you:

    Are you making continual updates to your website?

    Are you building quality links to your website consistently?

    Are you putting up fresh, unique content consistently?

    Does your website have a good user experience?

    If you answer no to any of those questions then it has nothing to do with hackers. You simply aren't trying to maintain your positions properly.
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