union_jakk

Ok heres the story:

Site was hacked on 18th of April and on a header page (that is attached to every one of 10,000 pages of the site) 18 hidden links were placed on the site! Every website on the server I use was also hacked and similar things occured, my site was hit worst because of the size and the ease of modifying the header. Another site on another server was also modified on the same date this pointed hidden links to mysite and all the other sites on the server....still with me?.....

basically all the sites that my site now had hidden links too were spammy adsense sites with no real content. but my site was given a load of hidden links from a 30,000 page site to boost the value of the links I think? not really sure why they did that bit.

I spotted the hidden links when my traffic droped drastically from 4,000 visitors a day to 2000 visitors then the following day to 800 visitors I was able to correct the error on the 24th of April.

My site now resides in google HELL, with only visits coming from MSN and Yahoo around 50-100 per day, no where near enough. I have never come accross anything like this before and didnt even fully understand linking and SEO until this happend and have since being investigating the cause and why my site has gone pear shaped!


I have moved the site to a new more secure server, and been on google sitemaps to request a re-inclusion request but nothing seem to have changed.


My site is still showing 2k pages in the google index today but does not appear in the search results for any of the keywords it used to. I just dont know what to do for the best


So im calling out to the iwebtool community, please help! is there anything I can do or am I best just re-hosting the website with a new domain name and just calling it a day with my old domain, really dont want to as its got a good volume of people looking for the domain itself by name! We also advertise in local press and radio.

Suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Bagi Zoltán

It is a really terrible thing that happened to you and maybe i'm not the most experienced webmaster here to give you really useful suggestion, but if i were you i would try to contact with google since it is possible that they would remove the filter which influances your rankings recently if you let them know the whole story. Registering a new domain is not the best solution in my opinion, because you will have to fight for the traffic again. I belive that somehow everything will be fine.
Good luck to you!

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Flipflop

I agree for what it's worth, I think if you site tight and wait everything should return to normal, the only thing to consider is whether the IP you are using (assuming you share it and the others sites have been compromised) has been penalised in some way, contacting Google can certainly do no wrong.

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Chart Music

How did you request a re-inclusion?

The advice above is good. Let Google know your site was hacked and now you've fixed that(assuming you have) and they should try again.
You description does arise doubt all hack related code is gone however. Did you restore from a backup? Are you really sure everything has been sorted out in your code, because if there is still something in there that shouldn't be your going to make no progress at all.

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Malatya

it is too bad my friends.I think you have to control the directory permissions for inclussions.Make dir 644 and 444 the normal files.Try it

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union_jakk

Thanks guys.

To request re-inclusion you create a google account, go to google sitemaps, and then on the top right (after you have verified etc) select tools then its one of the options. 'Request Website Reinclusion'

The malicious code is definately removed, I restored back-up from before the 18th when the hack occured and the new server is much cleaner and well protected.

However, when I do site:http://www.mydomain.com some of the cache URL's still have the old data with hidden links so this may be holding me back. However all the main pages have been re-indexed (arround 300 from home page or within a 2 links of home page) and I have re-submitted a sitemap to increase the speed of re indexing.

Im beging to think now that I have a penalty as when I put "mydomain.com" into google other sites come up first that are linking to me or one just mentions my site in a news article with PR0!

Has anybody had any experience with a ban? ie what sort of time period am I looking at for a penalty? Is it permanent?

I think my best course of action will be to sit tight another couple of weeks and once the entire site has been re-indexed and all bad code has gone see if my site starts to perform again in the search. If it still isnt resolved I will have to create a new domain name and start contacting anybody who has linked to me and request they change to my new site as this is my main source of income I cant wait arround 12 months for a ban to be lifted. What do you guys think?

Katey

Hi there,

You should keep regular backups of your website, if you are using cPanel use your Cron Jobs to keep backups.


Regards,
Kieran Taylor.