Ranking Recovery · Part 5
The other half of recovery
Most advice about recovering from a hack is about getting the bad pages out of Google. That is half the job. The other half is getting the good pages back in, and it is the half that brings customers.
During a compromise, real pages often fall out of the index. Google was shown something else at those addresses, or was blocked from them, or simply spent its attention on thousands of spam pages instead. Once the site is clean, those real pages need to be seen again. Search Console gives you a direct way to ask: the Request Indexing button.
What Request Indexing does
Paste a full page address into the search box at the top of Search Console. This is URL Inspection. It reports whether that page is in Google, when it was last crawled, and any reason it was left out. On the same screen is a link labeled Request Indexing.
Pressing it puts that one address into a priority queue to be crawled. That is all. It is a request, not a command. Google still decides whether the page is worth indexing once it has looked.
Three limits are worth knowing.
- It works one address at a time. There is no bulk version.
- There is a daily quota. After a small number of requests in a day, Search Console tells you to try again tomorrow.
- Asking twice does not help. Repeating a request for the same page does not move it up the queue.
Google Search Console URL inspection: read before you request
The inspection result is more valuable than the button. Read it first, because it often shows why the page is missing, and a request will not fix a page that Google has a reason to exclude.
Look at four things.
- Is the URL on Google? If yes, there is nothing to request.
- Crawl allowed? If this says no, robots.txt is blocking the page. A request will fail until that is fixed.
- Indexing allowed? If no, the page carries a noindex instruction. Find it and remove it.
- User-declared canonical and Google-selected canonical. If these point somewhere unexpected, the page is telling Google another address is the real one.
After a hack, the second and third are the common culprits. Attackers add noindex to real pages. Owners add blocking rules in a hurry. A page with either one cannot be indexed however many times you ask.
Test Live URL: the button next to it
URL Inspection normally shows what Google saw on its last visit. The Test Live URL button fetches the page right now and shows what Google sees today.
This is the single most useful check in recovery, for two reasons. It tells you whether your fix has actually taken effect on the server, without waiting for the next crawl. And it shows you the page as Google receives it, which after a hack is not always the page you see in your browser. If the attackers’ cloaking is still partly in place, the live test is where it shows.
From the case file. During the compromise, visitors arriving normally saw the real site, while search engines were served the spam. The owner’s own browser showed nothing wrong. The difference was only visible by asking for the page the way Google asks for it.
Which pages to request, and in what order
With a small daily quota, order matters. Do not start at the top of the sitemap and work down.
- The homepage. It links to everything else, so recrawling it leads Google to the rest.
- The pages that bring business. Main services, contact, location.
- Hub pages. Any page that links to many others — a services index, a blog index.
- Everything else can wait for the sitemap. Google will find it through the links on the pages above.
On a small site, a week of requests covers every page that matters. On a large one, request the hubs and let the sitemap do the rest. What a sitemap is for after a hack is the next part.
When requesting does nothing
Sometimes a page is requested, crawled, and still not indexed. The inspection then says “Crawled – currently not indexed.” That is not a technical failure. Google looked and decided the page did not earn a place.
This is uncomfortable but worth facing. After a hack it is tempting to blame every missing page on the compromise. Some pages were never strong enough to be indexed reliably, and the hack only exposed it. A page of two hundred words that says what a dozen other sites say will be passed over on a clean site too.
For those pages, more requests will not help. A better page will.
Do not use it on the spam
It can seem clever to request indexing for the spam addresses, so that Google fetches them and sees they are gone. For a handful, the live test does exactly that and is harmless. As a method for thousands, it is not practical: the quota is far too small.
There is a better way to get dead addresses re-fetched in bulk, and it uses links rather than requests. That is covered in Part 6.
What a healthy recovery looks like here
Inspect your ten most important pages once a week and note two things for each: whether it is on Google, and the date of the last crawl. In a recovery that is going well, the “on Google” column fills in over the first few weeks, and the last-crawl dates keep moving forward. If the dates stop moving, Google has stopped visiting, and the cause is usually a block or an error introduced since the last check.
Indexed is not the same as found
Getting a page back into the index means Google has it. It does not mean anyone will see it. An indexed page can sit on the fifth page of results for every search that matters. Indexing is the entry ticket. Where the page stands once it is in depends on what the page says and how the site around it is built.
Once your real pages are back in the index, the next question is what Google makes of them. The Free Visibility Snapshot is a short analysis of what Google currently sees on your site, which is worth having before you decide what to rebuild.
See what Google seesFree · the Free Visibility Snapshot™ · a narrow look at four signals, not an audit
Back: Google Search Console Crawl Errors After a Hack: Which Ones Are Good News
Next: What Is a Sitemap, and Why It Matters After a Hack
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