Interesting accident! Injection attack boosts earnings

Got an injection attack on my site

[anxvariety]

I got a SQL injection attack on my web-site a few days ago.

I hadn't checked my site in a couple weeks - but noticed my earnings had gone up 30%.

So I go to check out the site, and all of my content was shortened to 25 characters in length with a "<script src...." appended to it.

Anyone make any sense of this? If I fix the injection attack, my earnings go back down! :)

[Hobbs]

all of my content was shortened to 25 characters in length

Ok, here goes nothing:
- Your pages were hacked into
- Your content was removed and page function was crippled
- Your visitors find nothing but ads to click on
- Your CTR and earnings are up because of that
- You are now out of compliance with the AdSense TOS related to ads on pages with little or no content
- None of those visitors are going to be coming back

What exactly are you happy about again?

[anxvariety]

I didn't say I was happy.

I was just nothing that earnings went up with added junk on pages. I'll use this experience, and if you don't gain something from it - then sorry! :)

I fixed everything Tuesday morning, and Tuesday was my biggest day in 4 years.

My entire site isn't dynamic, so the site was still very useful.. so what you're saying is obviously true, but I don't see anything to drum about.

[anxvariety]

- Your pages were hacked into
No, an injection attack. Nothing was "hacked".

- Your content was removed and page function was crippled
No, the content was not removed it was shortened.

- Your visitors find nothing but ads to click on
CTR was actually lower, but ECPM up.

- Your CTR and earnings are up because of that
False, see above.

- You are now out of compliance with the AdSense TOS related to ads on pages with little or no content
Perfectly in compliance with AdSense, though wasn't delivering complete content that I want my users to have.

- None of those visitors are going to be coming back
83% of my visitors are first time visitors. That's just fine with me ;)

Anything else? LOL

[purplecape]

anx, from your original post, it really did seem that you were OK with what had happened, since your earnings had gone up.

You've now provided some more context. But that wasn't there earlier, and i suspect that that was what Hobbs reacted to.

[anxvariety]

Yeah I am OK with it.. because I learned my site wasn't maximizing it's ad placement or payout. So was a great lesson in page size/content length. But yeah I was joking implying that I didn't want to remove it at the expense of profits, I've been in the AdSense program for 5-6 years so I'm following rules well.