Subdomain hijacked for spam. How to restore Google ranking?

Question

I just discovered that a subdomain of my personal domain name had been hijacked and abused by SEO spammers since November last year. I did not discover this until I added my site as a domain property to the Google Search Console today and discovered a subdomain with thousands of pages on it, which has been taken down already.

The reason for this seems to be that I had kept * pointed to my @ records, which in turn point to the GitHub Pages servers.

Now, this is very stupid of me and the GH Pages manual warns against this, but this is simply an oversight from back when I was moving web hosts. I have idientified the issue and removed the DNS record.

This really seems to have affected the Google search placement if you look up my own name, as my own website is now way down on page 2 when you look up my name as opposed to the 2nd placement on page 1, right after my Twitter account.

As the search ranking of the site seems to be affected by a manual action or an automated security action, there should be a way for me to find a message about it and appeal. However, I don't seem to find anything realted to this in the Message Pane in Google Search Console.

The only thing I seem to be able to do is to request the removal of that subdomain, but is there anything else but waiting that I can do to restore my ranking?

Answer 1

As far as my knowledge, there is nothing much that can be done.

I am afraid the ranking cannot be restored using any tool or action. You need to rebuild your reputation from the current stage.

What you can do is to protect your dns and take necessary security measures to avoid such thing in future.

Even if google removes the bad or infected URLs, still your domain and ip reputation cannot be restored. There is no alternative, according to me, for this loss.