Comments on: Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN the Easy Way

By: Kiper IT-konsult

Kiper IT-konsult — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:50:09 +0000

I learned this the hard way two years ago when my hosting company got hacked by a former employee… I had almost all my customers on their webserver. These are my preparatory tips learnt from that lesson:
Always backup, backup and backup! Then you will at least have the possibility to go back to a version before you got comprimised.
Find a hosting company that really cares about security and don’t forget to update your scripts/applications with the latest security patches as soon as they are out there!

By: max

max — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:18:08 +0000

don’t have a index.php file, only use .htm files… I didn’t have this site registered with google webmaster…thanks for your feedback

By: Hummerbie

Hummerbie — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:24:19 +0000

@max: Sorry to hear that, did you check your index.php file as well?
Does Google webmaster tool help with some kind of error?

By: max

max — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:31:04 +0000

i had a somewhat similar incident happen on my website- i lost my rankings in google (they went from page 1 to page 6) and in yahoo too.. both at the same time. I just took a look at my .htaccess file and did not have the hacked lines like you did, but i do remember doing one 301 redirect for one page about the time it tanked… i’ve removed the 301 redirect, but my site is still tanked… anyone ever experience this before? strange thing is that i’m still in the google index. still have my page ranking, but in a terrible position… i still have the same number of backlinks in google and yahoo…

By: Jane

Jane — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:52:06 +0000

I like Picturepin-xp to save my passwords

By: Hummerbie

Hummerbie — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:16:56 +0000

@Tom D: Did you check your website in Google’s webmaster central? I also would suggest looking at the index.php file if you use that in your site for strange coding, possible even with 64Bits hexdecimal encryption.

Since you are using a strange system for me, coming via a hubspot based cms this could be a problem as well if there was something wrong on their side, you have to check with them.

if you have more statistics of your visitors and how they reach your site, you could check how your SERP positions are now.
But there was also a Google index update around that date, so that might have caused your site to drop in rankings.

By: Tom D

Tom D — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:17:05 +0000

We launched our website this past September and saw traffic grow steadily. Google traffic always grew week to week at times as high as 10% per week. On March 29, this began a complete reversal. Our traffic is now down 40% from google highs in March. We are at a loss to the reason. We are making all the basic SEO changes, but I really believe something specific happned on that date. Any one have any suggestions…..the site is http://www.anything4restaurants.com. We know we have a lot of duplicate content, but tha has been the same from day one.

By: James @ Dolphin Promotions

James @ Dolphin Promotions — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:18:38 +0000

Bloody hell sorry to hear that happened to you. It is scary how easy it is to have your site hacked.

The worst cases we have had is people accessing the DB and inserting questionable code. The worst problem is that it is vital to identify it asap as it normally involves links or malicious code that screws you up in Google.

By: Hummerbie

Hummerbie — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:16:23 +0000

@Andy: Sorry to there that, hope you can overcome a possilbe drop in your traffic asap.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:21:41 +0000

very useful article . Thank you for sharing. Our site was hacked recently. It would have save us lots of headache if we knew about this.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:20:35 +0000

Our site http://www.andatech.com.au was hacked together with all the websites in the same hosting. .htaccess attacked and corrupted all the .html file and index.php files. We decided to move host as we thought it is coming internally

By: jamal

jamal — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:29:08 +0000

My website dropped significantly in traffic too. I was troubled by that for days. I’m working now to build it back up.