A Hacked Practice Website, Cleaned Up And Rebuilt Without Losing Its Search Traffic

Hunter Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery is a specialist surgical practice in Newcastle. Many patients arrive on a referral from their dentist, then look the practice up before they book.

A hacked site, still showing in Google

The old WordPress site had been compromised. A rogue administrator account sat in the back end, casino spam pages had been injected in six languages, and 26 of those spam URLs were still indexed in Google Search Console when we started. For a surgical practice, a referred patient clicking through to spam is the worst first impression there is. The site was also slow and hard for the team to update.

Clean it, then rebuild it without breaking what ranked

We removed the rogue account, cleaned the install and confirmed it with a Wordfence scan. Every spam URL was set to return 410 Gone, which tells Google the page is gone for good. Then we rebuilt the site with a new design, mapped every URL that already ranked before the move, and checked each one after launch on 18 August 2026.

Clean, rebuilt, and the search traffic held

Of the 100 URLs in the pre-launch baseline, 9 were spam and were removed on purpose. Of the other 91, 90 load or redirect to their new page; the one that doesn't is an old image attachment page. Search clicks held through the rebuild, 858 in the 48 days before launch and 854 in the 48 days after, and visits from search rose 14%, from 1,461 to 1,670 (Australia only). The core searches held their place, with the homepage at an average position of 2.0 for “maxillofacial surgeon newcastle” and 3.5 for “oral surgeon newcastle” (Search Console, 2 Sep to 19 Oct 2026).

Hunter OMS's numbers are Hunter OMS's numbers, and a rebuild like this is judged on what it doesn't lose. What transfers is the method: clean first, map every ranking URL before the move, and check every one after.