Protecting your website domain from squatters

I had a rude awakening a little while back with my folks website, remericasomersetrealty.com. I stumbled onto a similar site, remericasomerset, without the realty on it. It was obviously someone who had nothing to do with Remerica, or Somerset Michigan personally. The site is basically full of paid links to surprisingly legitimate sites. Whether or not they know where their advertising dollars are going (I assume the motive for the owners of the site to promote them is money coming from some where) is a mystery, though I would think not for some of them.

Some of the site I saw at a glance on the page included:

homegain.gom
realtor.com
mollymaid.com
dice.com

Pretty surprising to me, and I wish I knew what more to do about it.
Here's the info on the site owner. West Indies! Surprise Surprise.

Registrant:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. (REMERICASOMERSET-COM-DOM)
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
+852.30164984
message@keywordmarketinginc.com

Domain Name: REMERICASOMERSET.COM
Status: PROTECTED

Administrative Contact:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. message@keywordmarketinginc.com
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
Fax- +852.30164984

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. message@keywordmarketinginc.com
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
Fax- +852.30164984

Record last updated on 03-Jun-2008.
Record expires on 02-Jul-2008.
Record created on 02-Jul-2007.

Domain servers in listed order:
Name Server: DNS1.DNSSERVER6.COM
Name Server: DNS2.DNSSERVER6.COM
Name Server: DNS3.DNSSERVER6.COM

Being Dropped from Google Really Hurts

Well, I've read alot about the horrors people have at being completely dropped from the Google index, and now I've experienced it first hand. The site is remericasomersetrealty.com, and doesn't even come up in the index at all when I search on "Remerica Somerset Realty". Previously it was number one (obviously). Google has always advertized that certain tactics are a no no and can get your site banned. Of course if someone hacks your site and is up to no good then the last thing they are worried about is keeping your site in good stead with google. Thats what happened to me. What they did was to plant an encryption that unpacked itself when executed, and displayed about 40 or 50 hyperlinks on the site. Only the hyperlinked text was non-existant (Nothing between the <a> and </a> tags). And they displayed it with a style tag attribute that basically said "nodisplay", so you can see in on the rendered page, but its in the source code. The idea is that these link get picked up byt the search engines and thier ranking goes up. I didn't catch it for a acouple of weeks and paid the price. I suspect, however, that if google is dropping my site for hosting the bad code, I doubt they are giving much love to the sites in the links either (though I did notice that THEY weren't dropped completely). I only wish that google wouldn't make the complete assumption that the code is the intentional work of the site owner. I have my site registered with google analytics and google webmaster tools. A simple email saying "your site may have an issue and you may want to check it" would be nice. Maybe they should update their algorythm to say "if (host == ipower) { bogus_code_source = "hacker"; }