| LED Digest 2225: Hijacked by a Porn Site |
|
|
|
How one site owner discovered his domain was hosting pornography by
his plummeting Google rankings. Plus - Keywords in Include Files.
==================================================
========== NEW ===================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 15, 2006 Issue no. 2225 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Hijacked by a Porn Site ==-- ~ Peter D'Aprix "...I noticed a couple of directories that did not look familiar on the server..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site-wide Keywords & Include Files ==-- ~ Brett Atkin "Why would you want the same keywords for every page?" ~ Chris Nielsen "You're right to question this action." ~ Mike Banks Valentine "...you can't automate Search Engine Optimization." --== Good Bot... or Not? ==-- ~ Sarah Hayes "A couple of years ago we had terrible trouble with the MSN bot..." --== Font Sizing & Usability ==-- ~ Will Bontrager "This has been an excellent thread." <Moderator Comment> ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Content Management Systems ==-- ~ Gwen Chambers From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: New Topic - A Porn Site High Jacking... Dear Adam I am revisiting a thread from a few months ago where other web designers were bemoaning the loss of their site ranking with Google. Many mentioned their sites had been high with Google then disappeared all together over night. I am wondering if anyone has had the twist on that experience I just unearthed with a site of mine. My site http://www.gourmetvoyageurs.com, a high end food and travel e-magazine site, has been well placed on Google and Yahoo for many years with new reviews being indexed very quickly and appearing very high. I carry Google AdSense on the pages to defray the cost of the site and noticed my income had plunged in July to 5% of what it had been monthly for the last 6 months. I checked my visitor tracker ( http://www.addfreestats.com - pretty good for the price ) and discovered my visitor traffic had been cut by roughly that same amount, to just a trickle. So I tried a set of searches on Google for the names of some of the major restaurants I have had up for years and that always come up on the first or second page of a Google search. Nada, even back 50 pages, still nothing. I tried doing a search of my name and the name of the site in different configurations which always bring it up. I found many sites that linked to me, but nothing for my site. I wondered it I had done something wrong to piss off Google in adding some static ads in addition to the Google content sensitive ad tower. Then, since the other ads were not working, decided to run through the site deleting them, doing basic housekeeping, restructuring the entire site, standardizing all headers, colors, h1, h2 etc's, dumping anything extraneaous and so on. The site was established back in 2000 using an early edition of GoLive back when it was still Claris Home Page I think, so there were inconsistencies and directory (folder) systems that were very out of date, but I did not want to change the naming and architecture since it would screw up inbound links from Google, Yahoo and the many sites that link to me. But I figured if Google had dumped the indexing anyway, this would be the time to do it. OK. That done, I started uploading the really clean and orderly site. But as I sat drumming my fingers and sipping cold coffee as the images and pages loaded, I noticed a couple of directories that did not look familiar on the server. Since my sites are all heavy with photographs (I am a photographer after all) a directory called "pics" or even "picus" would not be foreign. But even with my very poor memory, these two did not ring a bell. When my new files were uploaded, I opened the two strangers and found a full blown porn site with thousands of links on my server. And not just in those two directories but a whole duplicate set in my CSS styles directory. And they had all been uploaded within a duration of a few minutes back on June 23, just a couple of days before my visitor logs say my traffic crashed. Now I can't upload even html files numbering in the many hundreds in just 3 minutes using DSL. Download perhaps, but not upload. And how did the porn hacker gain access to the server? First I changed my password then started to dump the files. But then decided to leave them for the ISP IT guys to examine as common sense began to take hold. Clearly someone had gained access to my server space and linked from their site to their files on my server with my domain name as part of the link. Google picked up on those links, ID's my domain name and cut me off at the knees, and quite rightly so. My first reaction was to erase the files so Google could re-spider and find a clean site. OK. But will they after this? The porn (no photos just names of porn, s and m, pedophilia and much, much worse) was strong stuff. I am no prude but this muck was the bottom of the barrel. I am hoping my ISP has some ways to track this type of thing and make their servers more secure. Or was it an inside job? A two minute upload of many hundreds of html files? From a CD maybe, but via DSL? Certainly not my DSL upload speeds! I have quite a few other sites hosted with the same ISP and they were untouched. But once the offending files are removed, do any of you have any idea of how I can get Google back again? Milk and cookies won't do it. Even a bit of Jamaican Rhum in tea probably won't entice them. Have any of you experienced such a high jacking by porn site or anyone else? If so, what did you do? Or have I missed these discussions while away on a trip? Will I end up having to change the name of the site, domain name, ISP and start from scratch? I am in uncharted ground here, at least for me. All ideas and experiences welcome! Peter D'Aprix, Executive Editor GourmetVoyageurs - food and travel e-Magazine http://www.gourmetvoyageurs.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Brett Atkin Subject: Keywords > Our web master wants to build an include file with > our keywords in it and then the same keywords will > be on every page. Will this be considered spamming > or have a negative impact on our [rankings]? - Andy Johnson, LED 2224 Andy, Is your webmaster suggesting using an include file (say ASP) for the meta keyword tag. Something like: <!--#include file="inc/keywords.asp" --> .. Include file looks like: <% page_keywords = "red, white, blue, orange, yellow" %> It is possible and I've done something similar but pull the title / keywords / description from a database so that I can update the tags over the web. BUT... Why would you want the same keywords for every page? One of the ways to optimize a page is by using the keyword tag. The words in that tag should be unique to that page. OR is your webmaster suggesting just dumping keywords into the top of the page somewhere and setting the font color to the same as the background, or positioning the include at the very bottom of the page to put it out of sight of normal page viewing? In the first case, SE's would consider that spam and in the second, I'm not sure, but it is very poor design. Brett Atkin http://www.brettatkin.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Keywords You're right to question this action. Depending on how this is done it may help your pages to be found. But there is a danger of an identifiable "pattern" of content that might work against you. Then there is the aspect of what people may think when they see this on every page. To me, anything except network site links and template elements that appear on every page is going to be neutral at best. If I were a search engine programmer (Which I'm not), I would create a way to analyze a site and look for things that appear on each page. Some things I would consider to be "ok", such as navigation, graphics, certain kinds of links, and small text blocks like for contact information. I would treat these as one occurance of the text on the site and not give equal "credit" to all of them. I doubt that all the keywords in the include are found in or relate to all the content on every page? If they do then I would think your content should be looked at. Why not spend the extra time to research all the scored keywords that relate to your site, and add as many as possible to the copy on pages they belong on, following good rules of English? I think the old concept of doorway pages is valid, but each page of your site should be a "doorway", with good optimized content on a specific topic. Many webmasters and some SEOs don't seem to consider that most search engines have some of the best programmers with years of experience. I feel programmers look for "normal" patterns of text and content both on the page and site-wide, and things that can be identified as different may or may not receive some kind of special consideration. Thank you, Chris Nielsen http://www.pcb-search.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: Keywords Andy, I'm assuming your webmaster wants to put those keywords in an include that provides "keyword meta tags" NOT page text for every page, because using an include to put those keywords in every page's text would be silly, would be a visually redundant, worthless to the site user and (depending on how many keywords you are targeting) probably would be considered spam to the search engines. The "keyword meta tag include" tactic is commonly implemented by webmasters and is completely useless for search engine rankings. It won't help you unless you have the same text on every page and that include uses ONLY text which appears on every page. Repeating keywords in meta tags which are not used on the page text is one reason search engines stopped giving them any weight in ranking algorithms. It is like saying to the engines, "Here are the words I want to rank for - regardless of the fact that I don't use them on my site page text, embedded links text, headlines, title tags, directory structure or image files." This is also why many sites don't rank well - because webmasters are still thinking like it is 1999 when keyword meta tags still mattered to the search engines. Things have progressed way beyond that point now and many engines ignore, or at least discount those tags. Webmasters are always reluctant to write individual PAGE title tags, individual PAGE keyword tags based on individual PAGE text and adjust individual page copy to rank well because they are not SEO's and it takes them too much time. That is why they are webmasters - they enjoy building useful and attractive web sites with automation built in to ease site management. But that is also why they are not SEO's, because you can't automate Search Engine Optimization. Mike Banks Valentine http://www.seoptimism.com/ -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Sarah Hayes Subject: Good or bad bot > About a year ago, the MSN bot became pretty aggressive > on our site, sometimes visiting multiple times a day, every day. - Cheryl Berry, LED 2224 A couple of years ago we had terrible trouble with the MSN bot to the extent that it opened so many multiple sessions it crashed the mySQL server. We ended up blocking the IP address. I understand from our tech support that although the IP address looks like an MSN bot it can be forged and is software deliberately doing this. Best regards, Sarah Hayes http://www.bromleynet.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Will Bontrager Subject: Font Sizing and Usability > The new LED site has [auto font sizing], too. > Check it out in the upper right of the page - Moderator Comment, LED 2224 But, I had to scroll to the right to see it :) A 800x600 browser window usually fits best with other tasks vying for my monitor real estate. This has been an excellent thread. I think more and more site owners are becoming sensitive to their older users, as I've seen several text size adjustment opportunities at sites I've visited recently. One even had the adjustment buttons floating top-right, staying with the window as the page scrolled. But http://www.led-digest.com/ is the first site, other than site design niche sites, that I've seen the opportunity to resize the width of the page itself. Good idea, that. Commenting on the link visibility aspect of this subject, for those who prefer not to follow recommended colors, the option of changing link text colors or other aspects, like underlining or size, might be provided to visitors. An article about a way to accomplish this, written in response to feedback about links at one of our own sites, is at http://willmaster.com/linkpref (redirect to long URL). The page with the article implements the idea, see top right of page. > ... someone else suggested a missing piece of > CSS code that... enabled me to click on the links. - Michael Martinez, LED 2224 Michael, would you please share that code with us? I'm sure many would appreciate it. Will Bontrager <Moderator Comment> About that width auto-resizer at led-digest.com... I'll set it to default at the narrower dimension. Thanks for the feedback. -Adam ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Gwen Chambers Subject: Open Source Software > Anyone thinking about selecting a CMS (Content > Management System) should be extremely careful > to NOT get locked into a closed, 'proprietary' solution > offered by a hosting company or service provider! - Marty R. Milette, LED 2224 Read your comment on LED Digest about being wary of proprietary CMS. What would you recommend as good picks for open-source software? I'm revamping and updating my site. Gwen Chambers gwen, hobbymatch.com
-------------------------------------------------------
The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks:
pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains
© Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"In the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces
down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged."
- Alice Walker
|
