In my efforts to win back Google, I’ve been making sure everything on this site is as it should be. Though I’ve done these before, I’ve just produced a fresh sitemap.
If you’ve never seen a sitemap. Here’s mine (a very large file, so don’t click if you’re on dial-up or slow DSL). It’s made for machines, not people. It contains a link to every page on geofffox.com
It’s a ‘shortcut’ I produced for Google, so they can crawl my entire site more efficiently. It was created by GSiteCrawler, which does what Google does – crawl by following the links between pages. By now, some of my links are 4 or 5 clicks beneath the home page and would never be found.
Some of the pages on this site are, in essence, place holders. For instance, forms to enter comments on old postings… though I turn off commenting after five days. Most pages do have some content. Often a single posting is found in daily, monthly, category and individual entries.
This site has 28,717 pages at the moment! I’m still off Google.
Hey Geoff,
Very sorry to hear that your site was hacked; mine was hacked a couple of years ago, too, so I sympathize! But I’m really pleased that the folks on the Google Webmaster Help Group (via http://www.google.com/webmasters) were able to identify the problem and help you find a solution :).
More good news: I’m confident that — assuming you have totally rooted out the problem — that filing a reconsideration request is the right way to get your site back in Google.
DISCLAIMER: I’m on Google’s Search Quality team, but Googlers who are better detectives than I am in this area are on the actual reconsideration request team; they’re the ones who’ll (usually pretty promptly!) handle your request.
It should be noted that the gsitecrawler you used to generate your sitemap was written by the very person who now works at Google and responded to your thread in the webmaster help group.
It’s a small world!
I’d also mention that having JohnMu respond to your thread and now Adam Lasnik of Google commenting on your blog is a very good sign that things will be back to normal soon.
Good luck!