Does a Hacked Website Lose Google Rankings? What to Do in the First 24 Hours

Yes, a hacked website can lose Google rankings, sometimes dramatically. When Google detects malware, spam injections, phishing pages, or suspicious redirects, it may flag the site as unsafe, suppress rankings, or even remove pages from search results entirely. In many cases, traffic drops happen within hours-not because Google is “penalizing” you manually, but because trust signals are broken. Users avoid flagged sites, crawl budgets are reduced, and infected pages pollute your index with low-quality or spam content. The faster you act, the better your chances of minimizing long-term SEO damage.

The first thing to understand is how hacks affect SEO. Most hacks inject spam pages, hidden links, malicious scripts, or redirects targeting pharmaceutical, gambling, or adult keywords. Google’s crawlers index this junk content, which dilutes topical relevance and can trigger security warnings in Search Console. Even if your main pages look normal, hidden payloads can still harm rankings. Over time, backlinks may be devalued, impressions drop, and Google may stop crawling important pages altogether. This is why “waiting it out” is one of the worst responses after a hack.

In the first few hours, your priority is containment. Take the site offline or put it into maintenance mode to prevent further damage. Change all passwords immediately-hosting, CMS, database, FTP, admin accounts-and revoke unknown users. Scan the site for malware and file changes, including theme and plugin files. Check Google Search Console for security issues, manual actions, and sudden spikes in indexed pages. If spam URLs are indexed, document them. These steps don’t restore rankings instantly, but they stop the bleeding and preserve what trust you still have.

Next, focus on cleanup and validation. Remove all malicious code, injected pages, redirects, and backdoors. Update the CMS, plugins, and themes, and delete anything unused or outdated. Restore clean backups only if you’re certain they predate the hack. Once the site is clean, request a malware review in Google Search Console and submit updated sitemaps. This tells Google you’ve fixed the issue and are ready to be re-evaluated. Skipping this step often delays recovery by weeks.

Finally, think beyond cleanup and work on rebuilding trust. Monitor crawl errors, indexing, and rankings daily for the next few weeks. Add security hardening-firewalls, malware monitoring, file integrity checks-to prevent repeat attacks. Review server logs to understand how the breach occurred. Most importantly, improve site quality signals: fix broken pages, remove thin or spam-like URLs, and ensure your core content is strong. While some sites recover rankings within days, others may take weeks. The difference usually comes down to how fast and thoroughly you act in the first 24 hours.

Tags: google-ranking-drop, google-search-console, hacked-website, malware-removal