Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Today we noticed 75,000 links in our WMT (Originally only had 710). We immediately checked where all the links where coming from and noticed our server was hacked and someone placed about 80 doorway pages on our site and spammed them out. We noticed FTP was left enabled from a backup we did a few weeks ago and it seems this is how they got in. It was an honest and silly mistake but it happened.
Now, we just recovered from a penalty 5 months ago and our rankings are doing great. The good news is there is no penalty yet but the bad news is we are afraid that it will come soon.
If this happened to you would you:
a) Go ahead and send in a recon request now and explain to google what happened?
b) Wait until you get slapped with a penlaty and then submit recon to google?
Thanks
Clean up, lock down then a).
My only question on that is why would google want to read a recon request for a site that does not even have a penalty yet? And what can they do about a site that just thinks its going to get a penlaty for this? There is nothing to lift?
Wait till you see something before sending in the request.
My only question on that is why would google want to read a recon request for a site that does not even have a penalty yet?
They did report that you had 75,000 links, and it's probable they'd noticed the 80 doorway pages.
Let them know that you saw the report in WMT, that you realized you were hacked, cleaned things up, and that you hope that there's no problem because of this. Thanks Google for alerting us to the links.
Thanks for that comment? This is what I was initially thinking, but everyone here recommends that I go ahead and do option a). The hacks and doorway pages have been removed but they were live for about 4 days so they are already cached in Google and the backlinsk in my WMT show over 73,000. I thought that warning Google (by doing a recon) that this happened might prevent them from giving me a penalty?
Let them know that you saw the report in WMT, that you realized you were hacked, cleaned things up, and that you hope that there's no problem because of this. Thanks Google for alerting us to the links.
Wow I am really confused now. This was my intention, to tell google. Everything is clean now and I want to tell google what happened by doing a recon but as bwnbwn said, "Like crying wolf when there isn't a wolf"
they are already cached in Google and the backlinsk in my WMT show over 73,000
That sounds like a wolf to me ;)
I'd go with A - it cannot hurt you, unless you don't want a manual inspection of your site.
Google is used to seeing sites getting hacked, they also know what a fast cleanup is and will appreciate it. Don't get hacked too often or they'll feel not so confident sending their users to you.
I'm not sure either way about contacting them. I'm very sure about hardening your stuff.
Thanks for the tips. In your honest opinion, would you do option a or b
[edited by: tedster at 10:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2009]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]
I assume, however, that those links all point to the pages that you nuked, so that should also help avoid troubles. But I'd still get it "on record" and into the very l-o-o-o-ong memory that Google is known for. You may well not see a penalty or filter at this time, since you cleaned it all up - and then this incident begins to fade from your mind. Off in the future, some little data bug at Google could kick in and have you scratching your head about why your rankings suddenly disappeared.
Again, I can see no downside to filing the request.
I have been through this situation few times when this type of attacks were not very common few years ago.(Atleast we did not knew about it at that time).
Now a days i can see it happening very often.
Few of the sites of our clients were hacked and it showed in google SERPs as "This site may be harmful to your computer".
We removed all the suspicious material and restored the pages. We had to try 3-4 times before we could fully protect the site from recurring attacks. (Site was really big with lots of coding over the years).
Every time we cleared the bad contents from the site we used to send Reconsideration request through WMT.
We have never faced any bad effect for this.
So I will recommend if it is showing in WMT as site is having harmful contents or something like that. Then you clear the site and put a recon request through WMT.
In my experience there is no adverse effect.
Also if you put the request through WMT the action is taken very fast (normally within 24 hours as per my experience) and even SERPs are cleared of "Site is harmful" tag from your site's ranking.
Thanks
Rajiv
BTW everyone, we know jumped from 75,000 back links to 212,000
Thanks
Rajiv
a) Go ahead and send in a recon request now and explain to google what happened?
A, with a twist... I'd ask a question or two even knowing I'm probably not going to get a reply.
This is what happened... blah...
This is what I've done to fix it... blah...
If you want or need to have a look at my site, go ahead, it's:
www.example.com
Is this something I need to worry about since I've reversed the situation and do not see a penalty / filter yet, or is the fact I've fixed the issue enough?
What's the best way to handle this? 404 the pages? 410 the pages? What if they go to live pages on my website, so I cannot do either, is there some way I can notify you our site did not ask for or endorse certain inbound links in GWT without completing a re-inclusion request, like a 'remote nofollow' tag, so I can easily tell you to just discount them while I work on getting them removed?
(Then I'd redirect all the inbound links to Google and see if they slap themselves with a penalty. LOL :)
This is what happened... blah...
This is what I've done to fix it... blah...
This is exactly what I am doing an preparing. Planning on sending the recon request out today. But stragnely enough after 7 days of this happening my rankings are still where they were before this happened..
Last month someone built about 5000 spam links to one of my sites, which is more than the site had altogether before that. The links are surrounded with other links to pharma and other nasty sites and sometimes contain keywords that I could be targetting, but had not been.
The site has not been penalized yet; in fact, I have seen a nice increase in traffic.
I understand that I can file a reinclusion request if I get penalized, but my question is, what can I/should I do before that happens?
[edited by: tedster at 5:46 am (utc) on Nov. 15, 2009]
I think I'll go ahead and file, and take my chances with a human review. My backlink profile wasn't squeaky clean before this though, but I don't think it is too bad.
The other question is would there be any point in trying to find who did this? It must be someone in the same niche as me, so I guess I should see who would benefit by this.
