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I’ve had my site hacked twice – including by some ratbag who put strings of Viagra ads on a couple of my pages – but, thank ye gods, I found the hacks quickly and no great harm was done.
But for some people, such hacks are not such a small problem. In fact, by placing hyperlinks on your site a criminal (or crime syndicate) in Russia, Turkey or Timbuktu can ruin your web business just as surely as if s/he had ripped your site completely offline.
Here’s a good example, and a cautionary tale. The owner/webmaster of www.boogiejack.com, a webmaster help site, had a horrendous experience that at first was difficult to diagnose.
Boogiejack was receiving each day between 2,000 - 4,000 unique visitors, and averaging about 80,000 unique visitors per month. Suddenly its unique visitor count dropped to less than 5,000 a month.
You can read for yourself how the Boogiejack webmaster’s dismay and curiosity led him to see how his site was doing on Google, and how he found his ranking had been almost annihilated.
“After clicking a couple of pages deep into the search results,” he writes, “I started seeing pages listed for my site that I knew I didn't create. As I kept going, hundreds of pages not of my own making turned up. When I clicked the links for these pages to see if they were actually on my site all I got was 404 errors (file not found).”
By searching the source code of some of his web pages, he was shocked to discover thousands of links he hadn’t put there. Boogiejack had “thousands of broken links to pages that didn't exist — the very thing search engines hate”.
He concluded that “the hacker was trying to siphon traffic from my site and at the same time, trying to boost his/her own site's popularity through the popularity and credibility my site had at the time.” Consequently Google was penalising his site as an apparent carrier of rubbish.
The resulting loss in traffic to and income from his site meant that the violated webmaster had to put his family home up for sale. Not a pretty scenario when some thief on the other side of the world uses his keyboard to steal your mortgage and your life’s work.
He’s not the only one struck by nasty hackers and consequent plummeting in that all-essential Google ranking. On Google Webmaster Help forums, a webmaster named Les wrote in February, 2008: “Our business website was hacked by a Russian gang late November last year ...
“Since the hack, our Google referrals had dropped by over 90%, with a consequent loss to our income. Even though we had submitted two reconsideration requests to Google, our page rankings have not improved.”
What to do to save your site and your livelihood from these hard-to-trace criminals? Talk to the professionals at 1stPlaceDesign, who are in the advance guard of protection of your website, and your mortgage. They have some nifty, innovative solutions to protect you, your important business, and your family home.
