Recovering from a Hacked Website 3 — Off-page SEO

Recovering from a Hacked Website 3

Part III, Off-page SEO

This is the third-part of a series of articles where I share with you the steps I took to recover my website Celtnet Recipes from a combination of years of neglect and from being hacked.

In the first part I discussed how I removed the malware and hacked content and then protected my site from further attacks.

In the second part I wend through how I updated my web pages, making then cleaner and making them load faster whilst ensuring I had unique content and unique and meaningful meta tags (on-page SEO, in other terms).

In this part I will go through some of the off-page SEO efforts that I have been undertaking on the site.

In a nutshell, off-page SEO means getting links to your site and promoting your site through social media sites and content sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, StumblUpon and Pinterest. I use all of these, either manually, or through sharing my RSS feeds with them.

In terms of links, I started with RSS feeds. New content was automatically pushed to an RSS feed and old content as well as essentially static content was pushed through another feed. These feeds were published to feed aggregator services and were automatically published to Twitter and Facebook.

For Google+ I semi-automated publishing by loading my RSS feeds in Google reader and then I published any new content to G+ (google+ do not like duplicate content in your Google+ pages).

That was the social media taken care of. Though article directories are not valued as highly in Google as they once were, they can still be an useful source of in-bound links, so I started an article campaign for each page that I updated as I updated it.

Also if a page or a part of my site reached a milestone or an important event or I could link it to something in the news then I released a press release about it.

Next I began guest blogging (this is by far one of the best ways of getting in-bound links with real Google 'juice' these days). I also started commenting on various blogs to get my name seen and site's profile improved.

Next I hired a few gigs on Fiverr to get some of this work done for me. There are scam artists there, but there are also some real bargains to be had. The warrior forum is also a good source of information and potential hires for out-sourcing this work.

Within a month of starting my income was beginning to increase again and I was able to use that increase to hire two SEO companies with different strategies to begin link-building strategies for me. We're just at the start of this process, but it's looking promising and I hope to give the two companies more URLs next month.

This is going to be a long slog, but I can see improvements in SERPs (an more importantly in income) already. As long as this improvement continues, in three months I will be back where I was before the trouble started and in six months I might even be able to live off the income from my website for the first time...

But I am trying not to think about that yet, as there is still a considerable amount of remedial work to be done, and in the meantime I still need to get the day-to-day work of adding content and updating old content going.

In the next article I will go into detail about a new aspect of SEO related to content ownership, rich snippets and Google+