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Google hates me.
By Laurie | August 22, 2009
Update: My appeal was considered, and I am again indexed and in Google’s good graces.
Today I have spent about three hours trying to figure out why the heck Google decided to remove me from their index. A few weeks ago, I got this little nasty-gram in my inbox:
Dear site owner or webmaster of laviedelaurie.com,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.
Specifically, we detected cloaking on your site. For example at http://laviedelaurie.com/ we found:
# purchase accutane # lasix for sale # where to buy acomplia # discount viagra overnight delivery # levitra for sale # purchase zithromax # buy soma cheap
For more information about what cloaking is, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355&hl=en.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from laviedelaurie.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
My first response was panic. I don’t participate in anything shady or against the law, and certainly nothing that violates their terms of service either. I don’t run a porn ring and I don’t sell discount viagra out of the back of my PT Cruiser, let alone on my website. I would never intentionally do anything suspect. I’m a Girl Scout. I color within the lines.
My second response was WTF is cloaking?! I checked out their link, and that didn’t really help me. I needed a link that would explain their link. It might as well have been written in Greek. No, I didn’t say Geek. It was already written in super geek. I consider myself a geek, but apparently I am not.
So what did I do after searching my site with a fine tooth comb and finding nothing? I wrote them a reconsideration note on the website, and forgot about it. Not smart. Apparently they denied my request, but I never heard another thing from them so I had no idea. Yesterday I was browsing their search engine and thought I would search for myself. Guess what came up?
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
This morning I entered panic mode again and started looking for more answers. I think I discovered that I was indeed hacked, and that a website had added directories to my WordPress blog code that was adding the cloaked links. Sneaky. I feel so violated. I have no idea how it happened. I deleted everything I could find, and changed my password.
Now all I can do is sit and wait and hope Google will re-index me. I feel like a Kindergartner that has been punished and asked to stand in the corner.
Topics: Daily Ramble | 6 Comments »
WTH? How the hell did you get hacked and didn’t know. Damn that is sneaky stuff. I am glad you are a little geeky and found the problem. I know I could never do that.
Posted by: Carolyn GWOW that totally sucks!
Posted by: Staceyhmmm….that’s odd.
Posted by: Linda @ My Trendy TykesI hope you get it figured out though.
That’s awful! I would feel violated, too.
Posted by: AnnaI’d assume it was some kind of outside source too, but I’d ask:
Have you downloaded or added any free plugins? There is no guarantee those user-developed things are harmless, though I’m sure there’s a way to flag ones that are suspicious.
On the other hand, there may also be a plugin that closes the loophole that a hacker or spyware-type program might have used to get in.
Either way, it might be worth looking into plugins.
More often than not, people get sucked into putting “legitimate” adware on their computers by not reading the agreements when DLing things.
BUT… this does seem fairly suspicious. Since these, are the same kind of useless ads we all know how to recognize and ignore, but being hidden in your site… and you not even getting a cut of the revenue
One other thought I just had… have you approved any commenters that could have been spammers? That’s a longshot, but if you fall for the “fake” comments, you’re allowing someone to post regularly without any monitoring. I’m not sure if it’s even possible for them to get in or modfiy content that way… but it’s another thing to watch.
Sorry this happened, LL!
Posted by: DaveAll three of my sites were hacked twice in the past two weeks, and each time they hid all kinds of crazy links and key words. Luckily (I guess) their hacking took my sites down completely so I KNEW something was wrong before Google did.
Posted by: corrin