A month ago the Wardman Wire was hacked, probably via a vulnerability in a software package. We have now recovered to our former level of referrals from Google; here is the graph. I have posted the data going back to the start of the year for context.

The key dates:

• Viagra etc. ads were inserted around March 17th - which is just before the biggest spike on the graph.
• Then there was a spurt for 2-3 days before Google’s algorithm took noticeable action.
• I noticed the hack a couple of days later (while doing something in my account there were extra files and directories where I had not put them), then blogged it some time after that here.
• You can see that I completely closed the blog for a couple of days early in April to move it to a different account.
• Recovery has taken about a month.
• One interesting point is that referrals from Google Image Search still seem not to have recovered.

A bit more background:

• This graph is referrals from all Google properties.
• Google represents around 75% of search engine referrals.

Wrapping-Up

So - that is one example of how long it takes to recover. In our case - about a month.