WP SITE HACKED?? Please Help!

[d33man]

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Hi

I've lost organic search traffic in the last 3 days and after looking at how this may have happened, evening searching through my content updates and site changes to see how I may have offended Google (90% of my organic traffic) today I discovered that it may turn out that my Word Press website may have been hacked instead!

Investigation

Basically as I was looking for my results on keywords I was ranking pretty well for before, I realised that in the positions where I expected my results, the following domain kept appearing in Google... with my content!!!

- tpo35easter.us
- gio53easter.us
- gyt41easter.us
- gio66easter.us
- rtk89easter.us
- fi97.net

I then looked them up via whois.com and discovered that they're all registered in Moscow under various names.

As they're all from Russia I'm assuming that my website has been hacked in some way and they're masking URLs??

Or they've nicked my content and Google has indeed blacklisted me as it thinks I'm part of the group?

Can someone PLEEEEEEEEEASE help? I'm at the end of my tether :cry

Thanks,D

[linktank]

there was a thread similar to this not long ago

Something to do with feeds i seem to rembember, cant remember who it was though now, have a quick search as im pretty sure they solved it

[d33man]

Thanks linktank - found Kieron's post about his website: Help needed - my site has been hacked in the SERPS

I've the same issue, only happens in Google... (so hence why I've had some traffic from other SEs but not Google)

However I've followed the advice on that thread, no luck :-(

I'm thinking it looks more and more like an attack though based on that thread:scared

[linktank]

post a thread here
Crawling, indexing & ranking - Webmaster Help

usually pretty helpful over there, have a look for johnmu(google employee) if hes about as he is pretty active there

[d33man]

thanks linktank we've posted a message up I hope they can help

[confuscius]

As far as I can see, your site has not been hacked ( I have 2 probable domains - my guess is that one of them is yours - easter eggs? ). What has happened is that your content has been taken and used as the content for a new form of spam attack on Google - I will not reveal the method used, albeit I am aware of at least 2 UK affiliates trying this approach! I have reported the offenders to the appropriate network.

To the best of my knowledge, this particular practice first started about 6-8 weeks ago and is a mix of Russian, Chinese, American and UK people involved.

Google seem to be doing their best to try to control this and I had my first skirmish with these people some 6 weeks ago. I have unique text phrases on all my pages so if I search Google for my unique phrases then it is easy for me to track down the stealers. They tend to take content from the top of Google and recycle it into millions of pages, the idea being to then cross link everything so in effect they usurp your position via replacement, assuming that your ranking is due to on page rather than off page factors - to them then this is just a numbers game. I have instances of sites that have successfully got in excess of 2 million pages within the Google index in less than a few weeks.

The damage has already done and I believe that you will have to wait for Google to remove the offenders and you will then get back your positions hopefully. The problem is not helped by the fact that these people are exploiting a particular method that can be used by virtually any webmaster that has root access to a server - hence my retinance to say too much about the method.

[d33man]

As far as I can see, your site has not been hacked ( I have 2 probable domains - my guess is that one of them is yours - easter eggs? ). .

Basically if you search here: cheap easter shearings break - Google Search the 3rd and 4th placed results are content from my website Cheap UK Short Breaks Reviewed

assuming that your ranking is due to on page rather than off page factors - to them then this is just a numbers game.

Yes my site reliaes on more on-page than off-page SEO factors.

The damage has already done and I believe that you will have to wait for Google to remove the offenders and you will then get back your positions hopefully. The problem is not helped by the fact that these people are exploiting a particular method that can be used by virtually any webmaster that has root access to a server - hence my retinance to say too much about the method.

So the site is fairly new, after 2 months of solid content writing, SEO building and website development, I started making some decent money through my merchants (you know the feeling, making your first few sales.... 15 at time of writing) and now kaput! I'm left with a trickle of traffic from Y! and MSN and I can't do anything about it!

Totally gutted :cry

Thanks for the feedback though.

[linktank]

keep an eye on the google webmaster thread you started mate there usually very helpful and should at least give you a explanation of the problem

[confuscius]

They seem to be targeting 'easter' related sites on a hit and run type basis - site:tpo35easter.us easter - Google Search - you can then re-search google for some of the visible phases as exact phrase searches and you can then start to spot other domains that have been attacked in this way - I know that it is little comfort but you are not the only one to have been attacked.

The network of sites in use is somewhat larger than your original list and given the number of visible sites from your sample search then the infiltration into Google is getting greater - for more competitive searches they are making page 3 to 4 of Google results and I see more and more every day - clearly a bit of a headache to Google given that the pages are invariably also claoked to a destination domain and as they have simple stolen content from multiple sources then they tend to leave less of a footprint than the SERP spammers of old.

[d33man]

My other half's chasing up a response via the Google Webmaster forum, best we got back so far is: "Yup, you've got something bad going on there with the site that's copied your stuff. I'm digging into it the best I can now, more information later I hope."

Agree that it looks like it is the Easter keywords which seem to have been targetted which is a real shame as that's where much of my success in the past few weeks in sales has come from!

Thanks, D

[karenlb]

Here's another post about the same issue (I think??!)

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/o...ggestions.html

Hope you can understand some of the responses better than I can.:scared

[d33man]

Here's another post about the same issue (I think??!)

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/o...ggestions.html

Hope you can understand some of the responses better than I can.:scared

Karen, it makes sense and that's exactly what I'm experiencing!

Thanks, D