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Should we be worried about a penalty if we quickly removed hacked content?

Should we be worried about a penalty if we quickly removed hacked content? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Maxster in Mexico says “Site hacks have been on the rise” – which I agree with  – “especially on CMS platforms like Joomla and WordPress. If our site was hacked and damage was done by the hackers (doorway pages inserted and spammed) but removed within days, do we need to worry about a penalty?” Well, I would do a site colon search. If you still see great search results and you still see traffic coming, then you probably  – you got it caught and removed before Google noticed it. In general, if you do see something like that happen, you can always go to our Webmaster Console. Check if you have any messages. For example, we might have told you that you’ve been hacked. Worst case – if you think that accounted for why you might not be showing up in search engine result pages, you can do a reconsideration request. But a lot of the people notice that they got hacked very quickly and they can correct it very quickly. And so it’s entirely possible that we’ll crawl your site, it’ll get hacked and you’ll clean it up and the next time we visit your site or crawl from your — the pages from your web server, you’ve already cleaned it up. So if you can do it and fix it pretty quickly, you might not have to worry about, “Yes this was a problem and we have an issue.”

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: