Wednesday, March 05, 2008

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"; }

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to read that this happened to you, Dave. Hopefully they'll re-index your site soon.