My site’s been hacked – now what? from the Google Webmaster Central team provides a much needed guide on how to recover from your site being hacked. Sites are sometimes hijacked in an attempt to inject code and links into that site, to try and boost the hacker’s site ranking in Google and other search engines.

Due to that, Google will penalize the site and the links within the site from having any influence in the Google search results. But that leaves you, the owner of the hacked site, with a huge mess to clean up. So Google decided to write a post on how to recover from such a hack.

I will not repeat everything Google said in their post, but in summary, Google recommends:

(1) Take your site offline until you find the problem and fix it. (2) Once you fix the problem, submit a reconsideration request in Google Webmaster Tools so you can get back into the Google index. (3) Watch Google Webmaster Tools to see signs of improvements (4) Once you are back, keep an eye in Google Webmaster Tools, as Google often notifies webmasters of issues early.

In addition, I compiled Google’s advice on getting your site relisted after a site hack, back in January of this year.

Related Topics: Google: SEO

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz