One of my clients just suffered a wave of SQL-Injection attacks, and the results are brutal. 

It all started on May 26. The website was very slow and we noticed unexpected query strings apparently trying to write links and banners into our source code. The IT team worked hard and diligently in order to locate and fix the breach. But it was not fast enough. 

When I checked Webmaster’s Tools, I saw the dimension of my problem.

While the guys were fixing, search engine robots hit the site and received many errors…

The immediate result was that search engines dropped thousands of indexed URLs and my beautiful long tail went to hell.

To make things worse, the dropped pages were mostly from user generated content (the attack happened in our commentary section) and the traffic suffered greatly

Besides making sure the site is running as supposed to and that the server errors are not happening, I have tweaked and resubmitted my sitemaps and even wrote a reconsideration request from Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Question for colleagues…

Is there anything else I could try?

Now the good news... 

For security and (finally) for SEO reasons, this client will be implementing new and upgraded backend structure and I will be participating closely. I am very excited and am finally going to have my friendly URLs and 301 redirects created :-)