inurl showing dodgy sites. Who do I tell at Google?

inurl, google, complaints, hack

[Silver007A]

Hi Guys,

I had a site that was hacked in some way. Every now and then, randomly, if I and other surfers clicked on a menu button they would be taken to a dodgy site, not mine.

My hosting company said it was a known issue with older versions of php and google new about it.

I have read on this forum about the "inurl" search term and when I do that at the very bottom of the list of urls, which are all my site except this one, there is a site to some dodgy east european dating site, that looks dodgy in itself.

I cant remember it being the site that appeared when I clicked on a menu link like before, but that hasn't happened for a while as I created a new domain and am redirecting with 301 from the old site to the new site which is developed in Joomla.



My question is:

Who do I contact at Google to tell them about this dodgy inurl site?
Was my hosting company telling me pork pies (lies) about php and Google?

Thanks a lot

:)

[lammert]

Older PHP installations have default settings which makes sites written in PHP easier to hack. These older PHP installations for example often allow the passing of uninitialized PHP variables through the URL query string. Passing initialization values to uninitialized variables is a common way to hack websites. This could be what your hosting company is refering to.

If your site is still included in Google's index and ranking, there is no need to contact Google. Cleaning up all references to the dodgy site in your PHP source and maybe moving to a newer PHP version will be all that is needed. But if your rankings tanked or your site completely disappeared from the index, you can initiate a reinclusion request. The best way do to that is in Google's Webmasters Tools.

A reinclusion request triggers a manual review of the status of your site. During the review procedure Google may also find other things on your site which are against their guidelines. A reinclusion request may therefore not always have a positive effect on the rankings of your site.

[Silver007A]

Thanks for the reply lammert. Since I moved to a new url, and it is created in Joomla rather than just html and css, I havn't seen the problem of clicking on menus and sometimes being taken to that dodgy site.

However, if I run inurl on my old url address, which is now being redirected to my new url, I can see at the bottom of the search results a site that is using my old url in its own url. I hope that makes sense? :-)

I wonder if that could be stealing traffic in a way I don't know. And I wonder who I need to contact at Google to tell them someone is doing something illegal.

[topr8]

>>I can see at the bottom of the search results a site that is using my old url in its own url.
>>And I wonder who I need to contact at Google to tell them someone is doing something illegal.

do you mean they are doing someting like:
example.com/mysiteurlhere

if so that is not illegal - it may be unethical, but no law is being broken (perhaps in a case where the url is a trademark)

>>My hosting company said it was a known issue with older versions of php and google new about it.

what a joke, if a site is hacked, it's the site owners fault, or possibly the hosting company's fault, the only action google would take is to actually delist your site as a risk to its users! basically if you've been hacked once, anyone can hack you and insert all kinds of things into your page, a link to a foreign dating site is relatively harmless in the scheme of things

(harmless to your users i mean)