SEO results hacked?
-
Hi there,
Since last Saturday I noticed a big traffic drop on at least the following two pages:
http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/ and http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/iphone-6/.I did some research and I noticed something realy strange. Unknown sites seems to hijacked my organic results by using the exact same page title and META description but leading traffic to another their domain. Look at those pictures: http://imgur.com/v6kglLU and http://imgur.com/Whx4l8K.
Edit: a competitor seems to have a same problem: http://imgur.com/Zzhter4. I just fetched both URL's in GWT as Google. In Bing there is a little sign of this problem too, so this is not a Google only thing.
Can anybody please help me here? This has cost me some real money since Saturday.
Tnx in advance.
Marcel
-
Hi Dirk,
After contacting Google by phone and mail, filing a few more spam reports and refreshing textual content, we got our results back and traffic/revenue has grown since. We are very happy, and no other pages got attacked (yet).
Thanks for your help.
Marcel
-
Marcel,
When you contact the site owners - a good guideline on 'how to clean' can be found here: https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked (specifically for Wordpress) - more in general: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/ - it could be that the hackers gained access by a security issue with the slider (http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised) so they should certainly check that Wordpress & it's plugins are up-to-date.
Good luck!
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
Let's hope the hacker only copied a few pages and not the entire site. What could a site like soft-solutions possibly do to clean their site? I think it's worth a chance to ask planchemag and wearemash to do the same. My new URL shows up if you search for 'iphone 6 / 6s hoesje', that's something positive. I filed a request for deletion of the old and hacked URL of the iPhone 6 page, hopefully Google throws it out and picks up the new and clean one like it does with the other search query.
I can do nothing but wait now I guess. I will keep you updated here.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
I have the impression that soft-solutions.nl already discovered that they have been hacked & have cleaned their site in the mean time.
It's possible that the hacker only copied 1/2 pages - it's however more likely that they copied the full site but that the other pages haven't been indexed yet. Idem for copyscape - if the hack only occurred recently, these tools (and Google) haven't been able to pickup all pages yet.
When I search for 'iphone 6 hoesje' I get the planchemag.com site. As all these pages are duplicates, it's Google who's deciding which page it's going to show. Google decided that in some cases the hacked version is the preferred one, for other queries people will still get to your site. It probably depends on the anchors the hackers used to the hacked site. The volume of iphone 6 is probably higher than iphone 5 queries, so they will probably have used anchors containing 'iphone 6' to point to the site.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
That second result is our homepage, I see that this one got indexed at the exact same time our own homepage got indexed. However, Google shows our (the good one!) homepage in the search results.
That's quite ironical indeed, the webdesign company.
The other result redirects to planchemag.com, which only gives one result on a site:www.planchemag.com/. What about this one?
Is it possible this hack only limits to those two pages?I used the tool copyscape.com and it seem to be only the following pages that are affected:
What about this one: search for site:soft-solutions.nl and you'll find our iPhone 5/5s pagina. Search for 'iPhone 5 hoesje' and Google shows our correct page as a result. How is this possible?
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
If I do a site:www.wearemash.com there seem to be only 2 pages from your site indexed at the moment - possible that the other ones haven't been picked-up by Google yet. Quite ironical that the domain wearemash.com belongs to a web design company.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
I just set the redirect, just to be sure. This is a realy bad thing, people can abuse Google to negatively impact a whole company and lots of individuals. That should not be possible, hope Google will fix this soon!
You assume the whole site will go down in Google and not only those two pages? This will be terrible.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
Don't think that it will change a lot. If the hack is done in the same way as the other cases (which seems to be the case), they copied your entire site into the site which has been hacked. They present this version to Google (cloaking - as you can see in the cached version) - but "normal" visitors are redirected to a different e-commerce site. To make sure the hacked site is positioned well, they point hundreds of links from other hacked sites to the cloned version of your site. So whatever you change on your site, will not impact the cloned version, which will keep it's position, until Google takes action.
It's a quite a simple trick, and to be very honest, I am surprised that Google is not capable to detect it.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
This should be a Google task to prevent her customers/users from those kind of hackers right?
Do you think that redirecting my iPhone 6 page to a new URL would help? I can imagine the hackers hijacked an URL, when I pick a new one and 301 redirect the old one to the new, will my own result show up again?
I already spoke with Google this morning and they are going to look after it.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
It seems to be a plague recently- there where similar cases on Moz the last two weeks: http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack (similar situation as you) - a site being hacked http://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster. It seems the hackers are exploiting a vulnerability in the slider used on these Wordpress site.
Apart from filing spam reports there is not much more you can do. You could inform the site owners that their site has been hacked & ask them to clean it, but I fear that these hackers are capable to switch sites quite fast.
Good luck,
Dirk
-
Hi Matt-POP,
Thanks for this opening, didn't look at it this way. All our domains got replaced by wearemesh in the cached page. The VWO code looks like ours, so do you really think they were testing? All of the source code is ours, also the canonical, only the domain got replaced by theirs..
We are using VWO but we are doing it by ourself. I'm not sure VWO is the problem.
This problem occured last Saturday. What we did on Friday is make our website mobile friendly for the scheduled 21st of April mobile Google update. Is this coincidence? The two companies who helped us with this change, made some changes to the canonical tags among other things.
A strange thing here is that a competitor has a same problem, wouldn't that seem like a conscious action (hack)?
@Patrick: We don't know them, for sure. If you go to the unkknown website, you see that they don't use our meta data, so that's the strange part.
Update: the domain www.wearemesh.com now redirects to www.ovsee.com, the same website you got redirected to when you click on the hacked result of the competitor I wrote about. The visual URL there is Finan.nl. This Ovsee.com looks like the perpetrator. But I still can't get a grip on it.. the other hacked result leads to www.planchemag.com which redirects to http://planchemag.fr.
What can I do to get my results back? I already filed a spam report in GWT.
Thanks again,
Marcel -
Their Google cache results were somehow corrupted temporarily:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wearemash.com%2F
There's a VWO code in there:
So it looks like they were split testing. The canonical is set to their domain which is why they took over results temporarily on these search terms.
It looks like the split test somehow grabbed your page info & theirs and split tested it giving theirs a canonical on your content. That would do it.
Are you using VWO? Are you using these guys to do your conversion optimisation? You may have the same conversion company who made a mistake or you may have the same VWO designer. I'm not sure how it got there but looking at the code, VWO does look to probably factor into the problem.
-
Hi Marcel
Quick question - I know you said "unknown", but are you sure that this site has nothing to do with your site? Like, did they develop or design your site at all?
Here is a help section from Google on these sorts of issues - it covers everything from cloaking to content scraping, and doorway pages to other spam types.
I would try contacting the webmaster of this site and asking them to remove your titles/meta descriptions. If they do not respond, or are not willing to cooperate, reference the resource above as Google has steps to take to ensure action is taken against sites that do this sort of thing.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or need more help, good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hey guys and gals, I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site. http://prepacademyschools.org/ My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop? Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial. My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel1 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Hacked site vs No site
So I have this website that got hacked with cloaking and Google has labeled it as such in the SERPs. With due reason of coarse. My question is I am going to relaunch an entirely new redesigned website in less than 30 days, do I pull the hacked site down until then or leave it up? Which option is better?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Bad for SEO to have two very similar websites on the same server?
Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Same content, different target area SEO
So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO_MediaInno
2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB" the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T0 -
Banner Ads help seo?
I see in OSE banner ads counting ads as incoming links - My question is has anyone done a study showing a non tagged banner ad link and its effects on seo? Does google counting it as organic since it has no tagging or since its in a ad spot its ignored?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Is this a white hat SEO tactic?
Hi, I just noticed this website http://www.knobsandhardware.com hosts pages like http://www.knobsandhardware.com/local/hardware/California-Cabinet-Hardware.html that are filled with permutations of products + cities. These pages rank for these long tail phrases. Is this considered white hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anthematic0